Ten Love Songs is the fourth studio album by Norwegian singer-songwriter Susanne Sundfør, released on 16 February 2015 by Warner Music Norway. Sundfør began writing the album in 2012 with the intention of it being about violence, but as she noticed themes of love and relationships coming into place of all the songs she was writing for the album, she titled it Ten Love Songs.
The production and style of the record differed from Sundfør's previous albums; she was much more focused on making a pop album with "repetitive" and "direct" musical and lyrical structures than her past works. This was also the first time she was involved in all aspects of producing an album, including writing, recording, mixing, orchestration, and audio editing, and this huge amount of work as well as the extreme personal themes of the project led her to feel very ill, depressed, and "naked" when production ended in 2014. While half of Ten Love Songs was self-produced by Sundfør, the album also features collaborations with producers such as Lars Horntveth, Anthony Gonzalez, Jon Bates and Röyksopp.
Ten Love Songs spawned four singles: "Fade Away", "Delirious", "Kamikaze", and "Accelerate". The album and its lead single "Fade Away" became a commercial success in Sundfør's home country, with both receiving a gold certification. Ten Love Songs received acclaim from music critics, some of them called it one of the best albums of 2015 as well as all-time. The record landed on the year-end lists of several publications, topping Dagsavisens annual Kritikertoppen list, also appearing on the lists of sources such as The Guardian and Rolling Stone, and ranking number 72 on The Village Voices 2015 Pazz & Jop poll. It won Sundfør three Spellemannprisen in the categories of Album of the Year, Producer of the Year and Pop Soloist.
Development and lyrical themes In an interview on 26 March 2013, Sundfør revealed she was working on her fourth studio album; she stated that the project was going to be more "repetitive" and less "shifting" and "busy" than her previous record The Silicone Veil (2012). She also said that she recently bought a Roland TR-909 drum machine to give the record an "industrial and very cold" vibe.
Sundfør initially intended to make a record mainly about violence. Writing of Sundfør's fourth album began shortly after the release of The Silicone Veil, her first plan being to make a "universe" out of two songs she wrote before: "Accelerate" and "Trust Me". She initially visualized the tracks to consist of scenarios involving statues, buildings, and weaponry. When she wrote "Fade Away", however, she decided to go for a more romantic theme different from "Accelerate" and "Trust Me". The material she wrote later on for the album involved subject matter relating to the connection between love, relationships, and hatred; thus, the record ended up as a set of Ten Love Songs, titled as such after more than half of the songs that appear on the album were written. While most of the writing of Ten Love Songs took place in Norway, Sundfør also stayed at an apartment in New York for two months where she tried to write songs; however, she felt too uninspired to write much material, blaming it on the city she was in, and the attempt was unsuccessful.
The lyrics were influenced by numerous poets and writers notable for taking risks in their works, such as Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath and Ernest Hemingway. While she wrote personal lyrics that were "heavy" to her when creating her previous albums, Ten Love Songs was where she went "too far" with what she was writing to the point where it "change[d] her mind". Writer Brenna Carley noted the use of long sentences for dramatic effect in the lyrics, calling it "a device that could sink a sterling ship were it not for the fact that such a slowdown allows for complete appreciation of her interwoven, goth-tinged lyrics."
Ten Love Songs deals with loss, grief, and the very dark and compulsive aspect of someone's love. It is a critique of humans being "vulnerable" and the consideration of this fact being "taboo". As Sundfør explained, "It's almost like the biggest weakness today is to be a human being, because everything around us is about perfection, as if we're trying to be like robots… If I listen to music or read books where people are saying 'I'm very human, I feel a lot of things, bad things, good things', that's what touches me." The title of Ten Love Songs is contradictory to the lyrical topics of the album; Sundfør called the title kitsch, explaining that the lyrics are never really about the topic of "love" that was "corny" at the time of its release, but rather the extreme topics about sex and violence that was discussed in the media. The tone of the artwork for Ten Love Songs, as well as its singles, done by artist Grady McFerrin also did not match that of the actual music on the album, which Sundfør said it "brought an interesting element to the record" by creating another "world or dimension" for it.
Production
Sundfør garnered inspiration from the works of Philip Glass, Carly Simon and Roy Harper in making Ten Love Songs. While Ten Love Songs retains the same "cold" and bleak feel of her previous records such as The Brothel and The Silicone Veil, it is different from said previous records in terms of production and music style; Ten Love Songs was the first time Sundfør was majorly involved in every part of producing an album, including writing, recording, mixing, orchestration and audio editing. This independence led her to execute her ideas much better on Ten Love Songs than on her past albums. In order to keep herself creative and inspired while producing the album, she read the David Lynch book Catching the Big Fish (2006). In an October 2015 retrospective interview, she suggested the huge amount of work she did for the record, as well as the album's concepts about love and violence that were a part of her life, caused her to feel sick and suffer through depression after production of the album was finished in March 2014: "Joni Mitchell says it's like peeling your own onion, and that's how it is. I felt naked. Without skin."
Half of the album's cuts were self-produced by Sundfør, while other tracks, due to the fact that she occasionally felt "a bit lonely" when making the album, were collaborations with other producers. Ten Love Songs features production work from Lars Horntveth, Anthony Gonzalez of French band M83, American Big Black Delta leader Jon Bates and Norwegian duo Röyksopp. She learned from collaborating that another artist could bring "so much beauty and interest" on a track, leading her "to just admit to yourself that you can't be everything."
In going for an Italo disco sound, many elements of electronic dance music were incorporated into Ten Love Songs also unlike her past albums. As Sundfør explained, "It's quite instant. It's not like jazz, you can pretty much get it after a few listens. It doesn't mean it's bad but there's something more immediate about it – it's like candy almost." Her move towards electronic music from her previous folk works also led her to use "the studio as a creative tool in itself." Most of the album includes sounds influenced by 1980s synthesizer music. Sundfør used various hardware synthesizers and vintage drum machines such as Elektron's Machinedrum and SidStation. Sundfør focused on using hardware synths instead of software synths, reasoning that she liked "having real knobs and faders since it speeds up the process." Jørgen Træen mixed Ten Love Songs at Duper Studio in Bergen and was also responsible for a majority of the "mysterious sound effects" on the record, Sundfør's favorite being insects crawling out of an opening door that creaks. The mastering was handled by Mike Marsh at The Exchange in London.
Composition Another difference between Ten Love Songs from Sundfør's past works was that she was more prioritized making a pop album with "direct" sounds and lyrics over her past works. As she explained, "I wanted to be more mainstream. Not in the sense of the sound, but in terms of expression. There is something about pop songs that, to me, hits me more than any other types of song do. I've been a sucker for pop music since I was a little girl, and I've always wanted to make a pop record. So I guess this is my attempt!" The biggest challenge for Sundfør when creating Ten Love Songs was the melody writing, more specifically writing melodies that would be suitable for pop songs: "I read about how people's brains feel comfortable with patterns, but even better if it takes a little turn, so that you have surprise but also familiarity. It's like an orgasm for the brain." While keeping the structure of the songs "direct", she also went for making compositional elements that were "surprising" and "radical" in order to excite the listener. She loved music that was "going one way then goes another, like a beautiful maths piece." Journalist Doron Davidson-Vidavski compared these surprising elements, which are sudden shifts of tempo and volume, to those of Stanley Kubrick's 1980 film adaptation of Stephen King's The Shining (1977). There is also "greater dynamic variation" of the "darker, slower-moving and theatrically voiced aspects" of Sundfor's works present on Ten Love Songs than her past works, wrote The Quietus Luke Slater.
Davidson-Vidavski categorized Ten Love Songs as a combination of the album Ceremony (2013) by Anna von Hausswolff and the Body Talk trilogy (Pt. 1, Pt. 2, and Pt. 3) by Robyn. Slater writes that the tracks are "movements" and their verses and choruses are "parts" of the movements. He writes that the orchestral segments of the record cripple the "grandness" of the album to let the listener process what they have just heard while moving on to the next track on the album. Chi Ming Lai of Electricity Club described the construction of the tracks as a "bizarre musical jigsaw puzzle", "a fascinating experience that continually asks the question: whats next?." musicOMH reviewer John Murphy wrote that Ten Love Songs is "not an easy listen", labeling it as "pop music beamed in from another planet, with an astonishing quota of ideas." Carley categorized Ten Love Songs as "Lykke Li by way of disco". The 405 spotlighted the record's "inconsistent" style, ranging from "languorous tragedies, to marketable pop gems, to tracks defined by distant, space-age syncopation". A critic for God is in the TV wrote that the style of the songs range from ABBA-esque ballads like "Darlings" and "Trust Me" to melancholy electronic dance numbers such as "Delirious" and "Slowly", that sound like more menacing versions of the works of Annie or Robyn.
Songs Tracks 1–5 Ten Love Songs opens with "Darlings", the final track completed for the album. Chi Ming Lai of Electricity Club analyzed the track to be a "short church service", with only a harmonium and choir in its instrumental. Sundfør mournfully looks back about what she was hoping for and afraid of in her relationship, singing "So, it's definite, then." Murphy compared "Darlings" to "Hymn to Her" by rock band The Pretenders. The 405 reviewer Jennifer Jonson was mixed towards the track, criticizing its use of overused pop song breakup tropes in the lyrics with lines such as "We wanted to believe that love/could lift us to the skies and above" and, "We thought love could change our names/and free us from earthly chains."