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snuggle’s sound is both three-dimensional and cottony, concealing a conflicted inner dialogue. Their abundant guitar riffs, melodies, and lyrics graze against each other to shape their distinct world. Members Andrea Thuesen and Vilhelm Strange located instant symbiosis as schoolmates at Copenhagens Rhythmic Music Conservatory, bonding over sprawling jam sessions. The self-professed “musical soulmates” lingered in Copenhagen’s underground for years before unveiling snuggle in 2023. Thuesen makes up a third of the trio Baby In Vain, which has rolled out grungey releases since the early 2010s. Strange established his footing producing the left-field boy band Liss. snuggle has become a shelter from life’s storm – oblique arrangements injected with equal doses of existential dread and poetic humor.
snuggle is a social practice rooted in intuition. “music has always been a social practice for me. A way to be together, and create, and have an community around something” Much of Thuesen and Strange’s output also sparks in domestic moments lounging in bed, improvising on guitar, and watching television, isolation. The project’s name references an intimacy that impacts these albeit moody routines. “One day, Vilhelm just came along and asked, ‘What do you think about “snuggle” – Thuesen reflects. “And in one way or another, it just made perfect sense to me, because we were both kind of cozy like that, when we need protection from crazyness.”
That softness was immediately palpable on snuggle’s debut EP, Calendula, which fused earthy instrumentation, catchy vocals and aqueous studio techniques. Those techniques, a new way of finishing music, on an analog desk with no recalls, informed more than just the fidelty “We found out that at some point in the process, stepping away from the computer made things more exiting in the sense that there was no going back unless you were willing to start over again.”
Goodbyehouse – snuggle’s first full-length for Danish label Escho – emerged during a period of flux and duality: a local café Thuesen worked at for almost a decade closed; the home Strange grew up in was sold; both experiencing heartache- and break; grounding points disappeared, lots of goodbyes, departures. These changes thrust the duo into a bizarre new chapter. “It is a bit of that childhood feeling of having to move and being taken out of something safe and familiar,” Thuesen muses. “You don’t really know what awaits on the other side, so you are a bit excited. But it’s also scary and melancholic, I like that same feeling in music also.” Goodbyehouse sheds a tear for departing youth, then calmly walks through the opening door of adulthood.
Save for percussion contributions from Tobias Laust and cello courtesy of Naja Solié, the album is the result of Thuesen and Strange’s collective isolation, love for jamming and experimentation. On “Sun Tan” bittersweet memories of a summer romance are recounted atop an ashy beat peppered with slippery voice samples. “Woman Lake” is a surreal ode to the state of Minnesota, conjuring a rural landscape, down to the mosquito bites, and a brief interpersonal flame. With its post-punk-inflected bass and muted fretwork, late album highlight “Water In a Pond” is gloomy, yet heartfelt. “It is both a song that has some self-awareness and it has some sorrow, but it is also a huge declaration of love for the people I love most in the world,” Thuesen says of the track. Across Goodbyehouse, uncanny earworms are permeated by painterly nostalgia.