Released a few days ago, Copenhagen duo snuggle’s debut album, Goodbyehouse, thrives in the delicate tension between humor and dread, melancholy and play. Formed by Andrea Thuesen (Baby In Vain) and Vilhelm Strange (Liss), the project quickly became both a shelter from the storms of their personal lives and a space to reflect on what the future might hold. Their name also embodies this blend of tenderness and unease. “We just thought it sounded nice. And a little silly,” Strange says. “It still feels both cozy and slightly off, which fits us.”
That sense of coziness tinged with disquiet runs throughout Goodbyehouse. “We’ve both gone through changes and break-ups in different relationships and contexts the past year,” they explain. “Goodbyes have been said to important people and places—lovers, friends, childhood homes, regular hangout spots. I think a kind of separation anxiety and mourning mixed with joy and excitement for the ‘new’ has inspired the album a lot. It took me a while to realize how much the album title actually encapsulates this feeling. Moving away from ‘home’.”
Snuggle first appeared in late 2023 with the EP Calendula, a fragile, heartfelt collection shaped by grief and renewal. Its title draws on overlapping personal symbols: “The Danish word for calendula is morgenfrue, which translates to ‘morning-misses,’” Strange explains. “It was my dad’s favorite flower, and Søren [Holm, the late frontman of Liss] once gave me a drawing he made of a calendula.” That quiet layering of memory about family, friendship, and absence lent the record a weight of remembrance, full of dreamy textures and raw, unguarded emotion. If Calendula was about holding on, Goodbyehouse embraces departures and transitions, post-grief and forward-facing. It doesn’t erase sadness, but it carries it into the future, toward new homes, new goodbyes, and whatever comes next.
Snuggle by Johanna Hvidtved
Immediate highlights like “Sun Tan” and “Woman Lake” showcase snuggle’s gift for bittersweet earworms. The opener, “Sun Tan,” is all luminous riffs and vaporized beats, the kind of song that feels effervescent until you notice the shadows creeping along the edges. “Woman Lake,” meanwhile, is their most direct and folky moment to date: acoustic strums and bowed strings unfurling into a chorus that feels like cannonballing into cloudy water. Andrea Thuesen sings of Minnesota, mosquito bites and Saint Paul summers, despite never having set foot in the state. “Sometimes people relay stories to you in such a way that you feel like you’re a part of it,” she explains. “And if you’re really close to them spiritually, even more so. Like you share a reality that exceeds the frame of your relationship. You become part of the other person’s whole life, even the parts you weren’t around for.” Memory, even imagined memory, becomes a ghostly collaborator.
‘Duality’ has been kind of a key word for this album
But snuggle’s genius is just as clear in their more oblique cuts. “Dust,” their apocalyptic love song, leans on a funky drum loop and dream-pop shimmer, conjuring cicadas, melting ice cream, and David Lynch visions of burning cities. Humor and fear feel equally present. “It definitely draws a parallel to everyday life,” Thuesen says. “A regular rollercoaster of ups and downs, conflicting feelings and experiences coexisting. It’s what life is made up of, I reckon. ‘Duality’ has been kind of a key word for this album—both lyric, composition and production wise. Working with contrasts like organic and synthetic, humor and melancholy, digital and analogue etc.”
Elsewhere, “Marigold” buries a cello under jagged guitar and slyly anthemic lyrics, turning intimacy into blunt secrecy. Much of Goodbyehouse’s texture emerged through improvisation and authenticity. “A lot of it comes from improvising and keeping the mistakes,” Strange says. “An acoustic guitar left bare, a drum machine slightly off, strings treated more like voices than instruments. Those things just kept happening and started to feel central to how we sound.”
Throughout, Goodbyehouse grapples with displacement: losing a café job of nearly a decade, saying goodbye to a childhood home, watching grounding points vanish. The record feels like a meditation on leaving safety, on stepping into a future that is both exhilarating and terrifying. Thuesen and Strange translate that duality into songs that are lush but unsettled, soft but restless, always circling an unspoken question. At the end of the album, “Water in a Pond” distills the band’s ethos most poignantly: a gloomy, self-aware love song carrying equal parts sorrow and devotion. It sounds like two people trying to hold still in a world that won’t stop shifting.
Snuggle releases on Escho, the Copenhagen label that has consistently set the agenda for adventurous Scandinavian music. Thuesen is quick to stress that the community is real but not monolithic: “It’s great being in close proximity to these great artists and friends and having a community around music and the label. But we’re all artists in our own capacity that make very different music and I don’t think I really consider us a joined ‘scene’ in that sense.” Alongside luminaries like Fine, Astrid Sonne, Smerz, and Elias Rønnenfelt, snuggle extend the label’s tradition of treating fragility, intimacy, and experimentation not as contradictions but as the lifeblood of contemporary pop. Now that they said ‘Goodbyehouse‘, snuggle themselves describe what comes next simply: “Touring the world, keep at it with writing and composing, keep on rocking!”
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