It’s not often that shared grief is the sparkplug for a band. Without it, Andrea Thuesen and Vilhelm Strange may have never found each other and become Snuggle.

Strange’s loss was public, tied to the suicide of Søren Holm in 2021, the lead singer of his former group Liss. Around the same time, Thuesen was part of indie-rock trio Baby In Vain, signed to Partisan Records and sitting in quite the purple patch. Unfortunately, once the pandemic hit, the band started to crumble as her bandmates peeled off towards other projects.

Both at a crossroads, they serendipitously enrolled at Denmark’s Rhythmic Music Conservatory (RMC) and quickly picked up what the other was putting down. Before long, the duo were deep in free-flowing jams and, maybe more importantly, in honest conversations about having the rug pulled out from under you; relationships, life shifts, and people leaving Earth and never coming back.

“We were just talking in a very unfiltered way.” – Thuesen

After getting to know each other’s musical habits and playing a run of low-key shows across Copenhagen, Snuggle released their maiden EP Calendula (the favourite flower of the late Søren Holm) in 2023 — a strung-out roadmap of the sounds and stories they were eager to project.

As beautiful as Calendula is, it wasn’t until my birthday last year that the Danish duo released their debut album, Goodbyehouse (via escho). A punnet of ten tracks that asks the question: how do we move forward when parts of us still exist somewhere else? A sonic message about arm wrestling with transition.

“Carsick” is my favourite of the bunch. A tune that presses on this very nerve – hurtling towards something you have little control over, and things changing around you faster than you can process them. Thick bass notes and slowly strummed chords accentuate a feeling of unease, a rhythm that never fully settles.

Like most of the writing on Goodbyehouse, the lyrics materialise as thought bubbles, offshoots of neural circuitry that don’t tell a story so much as capture a state of mind, all rich with imagery.

Thuesen sings: