She’s just gone and announced the comeback we’ve ALL been waiting for (if you know what’s what). Velvet returns with a brand-new single on December 25th! ‘Saturday Or Sunday Night’ features House of Dreams and finds Velvet at her dance-pop best, but with a suitably 2020 disco twist.
It’s been over half a decade since she last released a solo single, and she’s been much missed by anyone who appreciates a banging floor-filler with its heart firmly in pop – which we know is a lot of you. She’s arguably best known now for consistently turning it out at Melodifestivalen between 2006 and 2009, but she’s that rare pop artist of her time who actually achieved more success outside of the contest than within it.
Launched in 2005 on the heels of September, she enjoyed a similar career trajectory of Top 10 hits in her native Sweden, with club and radio exposure soon transferring to Europe, too. A UK launch was put together around the same time as September and Agnes, though she never did enjoy the same chart success in Britain as those two. Still, two albums’ worth of material were released to great acclaim, and she was most definitely at the forefront of a wave of brilliant pop music coming out of Sweden in 2007, 2008 and 2009 – the very same wave that made us start up this website in the first place in August 2008. So if you’re a regular reader in 2020, you have Velvet to partially thank for that.
With a new era on the horizon, we thought it appropriate to look back over past eras that the Swedish songstress has gifted us. And so we’ve sifted through her albums, her singles, and her comebacks, to come up with our definitive Top 10 of her best. Her Top 10 most essential tracks.
Here’s the accompanying playlist (featuring not just her 10 best, but 14 more of our fave highlights from her back catalogue).
And here’s the Top 10;
10. MI AMORE (2006)
After a few years serving in the Melodifestivalen house-choir, Velvet made her Melfest debut as a main artist in 2006. Despite having already scored a couple of Top 10 hits in Sweden with dance tracks by that point, she was given this ethno-banger to compete with – hot on the heels of Helena Paparizou winning Eurovision with ‘My Number One’ the year before. It’s not a genre she’d dabbled in before – or since, for that matter – but she took to it like a pro, and sent the song to Andra Chansen. An impressive result from a heat STACKED with Magnus Carlsson, Kikki Danielsson, Sonja Aldén, Niclas Wahlgren and (don’t laugh) Östen Med Resten with their beloved dansband-banger ‘Ge Mig En Kaka Till Kaffet’!
09. THE QUEEN (2009)
Velvet’s third (and thus far final) appearance in Melodifestivalen came in 2009, and off the back of a crashing-out-in-her-heat appearance in 2008. But despite this, her addition to the line-up in 2009 was still quite the coup for SVT. In the year prior to ‘The Queen’, her songs had started taking off around parts of Europe, with even a UK record deal having been signed in late 2008. She delivered one of the THE most iconic performances of the year with the song (thanks in no small part to the most regal of gowns), but Swedish viewers were alas far more interested in the contest debuts of both EMD and Molly Sandén, in that same heat.
08. LOVE STUCK (2012)
Her comeback single released three years after closing the chapter on ‘The Queen’ album. But mercifully, she hadn’t closed any chapters on making terrific dance-pop. “You make me wanna take it up a level. You make me wanna stick it like a poster on the wall” is one of the punchiest lyric deliveries of her career, making the song a rich Velvet classic.
07. COME INTO THE NIGHT (2009)
At the time of its release, our appreciation for this never really swelled beyond “riding on the coat-tails of Take My Body Close” (which, in itself, was still quite a lot of appreciation on our part). But recent re-assessments have led us to discover that it’s much more than just that. It takes the sound of its predecessor much deeper into the ’80s, and on that journey it ramps up the fun factor, the hi-campery and the carefree attitude and approach. Best enjoyed along with the drawn-out intro of the extended version.
06. RADIO STAR (2009)
On an album (her second) so stacked with hits, this gem was inconceivably never released as a single. Along with ‘Deja Vu’ and ‘Fix Me’, it’s probably the most Europop thing on there, with definite leanings into schlager. And given it’s 3:02 length, we’d be surprised if this wasn’t submitted to Melodifestivalen 2009 along with ‘The Queen’. Oh what could have been.
05. DEJA VU (2008)
Pure schlager, dressed up to the nines in dance music. This was tailor-made for Melodifestivalen, and sure enough competed in the 2008 contest. But in a heat which received more than 500,000 votes, ‘Deja Vu’ lost out on a place in Andra Chansen by a mere 101 points. And it had to settle for 5th place, thus crashing out of the competition. By 0.0002% of the vote. Horrifying. Nevertheless, it remains a Melfest classic – to those that know best and have taste.
04. VICTORIOUS with Linda Bengtzing (2010)
If ‘Deja Vu’ was pure schlager dressed up to the nines in dance music, then ‘Victorious’ was pure schlager laid bare for all the world to enjoy. Rumour has it that this was rejected for Melodifestivalen in 2010, but then Melfest 2010 was a bizarre year, all things considered. For the release of the single, we ended up getting a music video shot in LA no less. And in it, we can see the song enjoyed for what it is – two besties and stalwarts of the game having the time of their lives via the medium of shameless pop music.
03. CHEMISTRY (2007)
Let the song’s title serve as a warning – this is an invigorating chemical rush of a track. Fast-paced, laden with strings and brass and with a middle-eight section that takes you out of lucidity. Best enjoyed via the minute-longer in length single version rather than the more compact album edit – because who doesn’t want their trip to last the distance?!
02. FIX ME (2007)
Her trademark hit, and without a doubt the one that she’s most famous for. It took her to the periphery of huge success, outside of Sweden as well as domestically. It remains one of the signature tunes of late-noughties dance music, and its charms have not diminished with age.
01. TAKE MY BODY CLOSE (2008)
Riding the decade’s wave of dance music that borrowed heavily from ’80s cheese, ‘Take My Body Close’ is perhaps Velvet’s most riotous burst of euphoric dance-pop, and definitely our personal fave. The song also serves as our top pick of writer and producer duo Pitchline’s own repertoire. Their production on it falls just short of including the kitchen sink, but does still gleefully add pretty much everything else to it – to wonderful effect. As with ‘Come Into The Night’, this song’s greatness is further accentuated via a listen to its extended mix. It’s like a particularly raucous three-way – with an ’80s rock god at one end, and a ’00s house producer on the other. And you, the listener, are the lucky guest!
Special mentions in Velvet’s great catalogue of tunes must also go to the following: her tremendous covers of ‘Dancing With Tears In My Eyes’, ‘Don’t Stop Moving’ and ‘Rock Down To (Electric Avenue)’ (!!!); her duets with fellow Swedish dance-pop icon Therese – ‘Don’t Stop’ and ‘Heart Of Glass’; another ‘The Queen’ album track that should have been a single, ‘The Rhythm’; plus the ballad version of ‘Fix Me’.
Full playlist of all her greatest moments right here.
