joki (Joakim Haukaas) is an award-winning, multiple platinum producer based in Oslo, Norway. After achieving his first #1 single at the age of 20, he has gone on to produce numerous hit records and #1 singles for artists such as Zara Larsson, Bastille, XXXTENTACION, Seeb, DDG and ITZY.

Recently joki produced 7/8 tracks on 44phantom's project "all my bad feelings".

Skinny Days (Dag Holtan-Hartwig and Halvor Folstad) are a multi-platinum Norwegian writing and production duo based in Oslo. While their main focus is songwriting and top lining, their combined talents enable them to write and produce across various genres.

Dag and Halvor have together worked with artists across Scandinavia and Europe, writing (and sometimes producing) hits for artists such as Alan Walker, Ava Max, Jonas Blue, Seeb, CLMD, Emma Steinbakken, Chris Holsten, Victoria Nadine, TIX, Julie Bergan, and most recently co-writing and performing lead vocals on Tiesto’s hit single “Lay Low”.

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moen (aka Helge Moen) is writer/producer based in Oslo, Norway. As one half of the duo tobago, he has worked with  artists such as Alan Walker, Kiiara, Felix Cartal, and Tungevaag.

Helge is frequently working with both up-and-coming and established acts in the Norwegian music scene, and some of his recent releases include top 40 single “Strangers Again” by Victoria Nadine,  “Lykke te” by Synno Vo, and multiple songs by Torine including “bitches get lonely” and “Cliché”.

His most recent cut is "Die For You" on Robin Schulz's album "Pink".

With a penchant for “rock chicks”, electric guitars, great choruses, and a nostalgic relationship to the 2000s, 23-year-old Torine has marked herself as a distinctly unique addition to the Scandinavian pop scene.

Whether you’ve heard of Torine or not, you’ve probably heard her vocals. In 2019, she was ever-present on the charts as the vocalist on Alan Walker, Tungevaag and K-391’s “Play”, a remake of the Mangoo classic “Eurodancer”. Over 140M streams plus a tour in Europe and Asia later, she signed with Universal Music Norway and released her first single “Dancing in My Sleep”. This was followed up by “Make U Cry”, “Cliché”, “Stupid Things”, and several more singles that established the key elements of her sound: big guitars and sing-a-long choruses.

In October 2022 Torine released her debut EP "UNHOLY".

After devoting five years to being a frontman in successful indie bands in Norway, multi- instrumentalist Alex Pavelich started toplining and has quickly risen to become one of Norway’s most productive and versatile songwriters. Recent cuts include David Guetta, Alan Walker, Ava Max, Nick Jonas, Purple Disco Machine, ITZY, Twice, IVE, and Seeb.

His artist project, Lovespeake, averages two million monthly listeners on Spotify and includes recent top 20 German radio hit “Tastes Like Summertime” by Off Key Junior.

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Jarle Bernhoft has a new album coming out in 2023, a fact that surprises the man himself. The Norwegian singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist intended to have a break from recording this year. Now, he finds himself reaching back out to the world with new music and a new outlook, propelling himself back to a global stage with a renewed ambition.

The UK may have first come across a young Jarle as lead singer of rock power quartet Span. He lived in North London where he enjoyed critical acclaim and a cult following. After they disbanded in 2005, he went solo, and soul, as Bernhoft. He employed live looping techniques, using a loop pedal to layer his vocals and instrumental parts, creating intricate and dynamic arrangements. The single "C'mon Talk," became a viral sensation showcasing this, earning Bernhoft millions of views on YouTube and introducing him to a global audience.This culminated in the international success of ‘Islander’ (2014), an album that explored themes of identity and self-discovery, blending elements of folk, pop, and R&B.

The album received critical acclaim and further solidified Bernhoft's reputation as a musical innovator. He became the first non-American to be nominated for the Best R&B Album Grammy.

His profile swelled with appearances on the Conan O’Brien and Ellen De Generes shows, he was about to embark on a huge US tour and then, as far as the rest of the world was concerned, he disappeared.

Maggie Petkovic is a Norwegian/Serbian artist, songwriter, and producer. Possessing an out-of-this-world voice, her music is known for its powerful, ambient hooks and heart-wrenching lyrics.

Maggie was studying at songwriting and production school LIMPI when the COVID lockdown hit. On her own and without anyone to help her produce, she had no choice but to learn how to do everything herself. So she did.

Her debut EP “Rainbows & Monsters” was released in February 2023 after a run of single releases that started in August 2022. Written and produced by Maggie, the songs address issues such as drug abuse, mental health, and insecurity.

Deep in the Norwegian countryside there’s an old mountain cottage. It’s been in the Holtan-Hartwig family for as long as anyone can remember, and if you didn’t know it was there you’d never find it: there’s no electricity, no phone signal, the only water source is a nearby dam, and you need to ski cross-country for at least two miles before you find the nearest road. When you’re there it could be 2021 or 1621, and to most of those in Oslo’s hyper-connected, 24/7 music industry it would sound like a nightmare. For Dag Holtan-Hartwig, it’s something else. “It’s an escape,” he says. “It’s a place where you can reflect on the life you’re living.”

In the last few years, moments for reflection have been in short supply for this singer-songwriter, musician, producer and true Norwegian outdoorsman. Dag’s contributions to hits for artists like Ava Max, Alan Walker, SEEB and Julie Bergan have brought international success, platinum sales and nearly a billion streams. But somewhere in the chaos he’s still made time to visit that mountain cottage. In doing so he’s found a way to capture his reflectiveness in song, and in those periods of calm he’s created Slopes.

In the spellbinding storytelling of debut Slopes single Prove Them Wrong and beyond, Dag has woven a dynamic but pensive collection of songs that explore the magical space between the city and the wilderness, the distant past and a brighter future, and state of the art pop and old-school authentic musicianship. Most of all, in Dag’s remarkably expressive voice and at the very heart of all Slopes’ music, is a uniquely articulated brand of melancholy. “I rest well in melancholy,” Dag smiles. “It’s easy to write a song that’s either one-dimensionally happy or drearily sad, but you can really tell a story when you hit the spot between happy and sad, and enter the melancholic realm.” Magic, once again, lies in the space in between. “Melancholy is the sentiment that speaks the most to me,” Dag adds. “It’s such a rich sentiment, and it’s a vibe I’ve been wanting to put into music for many years. It wasn’t until recently that I found the confidence.”

Building the world of Slopes is not a decision Dag has taken lightly, having seen first hand the demands of a life in the spotlight. “Working with so many different artists around the world I know how hard it is — gaining success, dealing with success, maintaining it,” he says. “But in Norway we have a phase: to go out on slippery ice. For some reason I’ve always liked doing that. Or, at least, I find myself doing it all the time. So I started to wonder if there was a way I could be an artist and do things exactly the way I always wanted to do them. And I thought that if I got it right, people might like it.”

The flashpoint came in the wake of heartbreak, when Dag left Oslo for Los Angeles looking for a change of scenery following the messy end of a relationship. He was hoping for new friendships and writing sessions, but found himself living alone with only his thoughts for company. The songs he started in that period were different to the music he’d been writing before. “I realised it would be hard for anyone else to say the things I was trying to say with those songs,” he remembers. “I realised: these songs are me.  I’m not trying to hide anything. If someone’s going to release this music, it’s got to be me.”

In the spirit of openness, Slopes is no mysterious or opaque studio creation: this is a living, breathing pop entity and Dag already has big plans for taking his music out on the road with a full band. “I’m really excited about bringing it to life on stage in the traditional way with a guitarist, drummer, bassist and maybe a synth player,” he says. “A band playing together, bringing these songs to life, will take me back to my early years.”

Growing up in a polite Oslo suburb he remembers as “a sensible place full of sensible people”, Dag was raised in a passionately musical family and first started playing in bands when he was just twelve years old. Of course the band names were all terrible, he admits, and their poppy, Oasis-influenced tunes didn’t sit well alongside the local death metal scene. But for Dag, there was no looking back. By his late-teens his passion for music had taken him to England and the prestigious Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts, where he performed for (and received a coveted double-thumbs-up) from Sir Paul McCartney, who offered some advice on one of Dag’s compositions. “He wanted it to end more conclusively,” Dag recalls, “so the audience knew when it was done. Then they could clap.” (This was years before the influence of streaming changed pop to the point where nearly all songs now end conclusively, so Macca was, as usual, ahead of his time.)

On his first day at LIPA Dag had met another Norwegian by the name of Halvor Folstad; they started working together and while still at college scored a record deal back home in Norway. After LIPA Dag and Hal went their separate ways, with Hal returning to Oslo and Dag trying his luck as a producer in London. Luck, it turned out, was in short supply: he accidentally moved to a music industry deadzone and, in a scene later echoed in LA, he found it hard to make an impression. “London’s a tough city and I was trying to hustle as a new producer,” he remembers. “It was a pretty bad four months.”

Returning to Oslo he was reunited with Hal; they formed the duo Skinny Days, releasing music in their own right and achieving multi-platinum success through work with other artists. But whatever the situation, Dag found a way to express true creativity. “You’d get a label saying ‘we’re looking for something like this’, and it’d just be a list of that day’s Top 3 songs on streaming services,” he says. “We decided that at the end of the day all anyone really wants is something that’s good, so we ignored the lists and concentrated on making good music.”

This instinctive quest for authenticity is front and centre in Slopes. “I went through some tough times in my teens and I think that means I’ll always look at life with a certain perspective,” Dag reflects. “Perhaps I look at the world from a slight distance — a lot of songs I write are related to relationships and complicated stuff but there’s always something about how dark feelings lift when you make a true connection with other people, trust them, and let go of yourself. There’s power in allowing yourself to give yourself entirely to people, but also let go of people when you need to. All of Slopes is about exploring those emotions.”

Dag mentions that when he was growing up, his father’s passion for birdwatching never made much sense. “But later I found that the minute you actually start to learn the names of birds, you start to distinguish them. You see how many different ones there are. You learn their behaviour, their personalities. You notice what’s really happening, and when you do that everything suddenly feels bigger and better.” For Dag, noticing and naming his own emotions has had a similar impact on his ability to express himself, and the results are all right there in Slopes.

Just don’t call it an ‘artist project’. “Fuck the word project,” he smiles. “This is me.”

JOP is an artist and songwriter from Lillehammer. In 2019/20 he attended LIMPI (Lillehammer Institute of Music Production & Industries), where he worked with and was under the direct mentorship of Stargate, Emily Warren, Fred Ball, and Espionage.

Now signed to Kookie Diamond/Columbia Germany, JOP has released several singles co-written & produced by HitImpulse.

Two idiots having fun.

Emilie Adams is back with her debut album "Island" – a conceptalbum about a panic attack. How should a panic attack be explained in words? How do you transformsomething so abstract in to something so concrete, and how do you put words andvisual explanations to this?

On the 11-track album, Adams takes the listener through the entire panicattack, an episode she also describes visually with a 32-minute film that shereleased with the album. The film begins with the words, "This is a panicattack, which to me feels like I'm about to die. And afterwards it feels like apart of me did," and is followed by the various stages of her own healingprocess: "Denial", "Anger", "Bargaining", "Depression","Acceptance" and finally… "Hope".

With her most honest and personal work to date, Emilie Adams manages toshow a completely new artistic side of herself with "Island". Emiliehas written and made this record on her own terms, resulting in an experiencethat clearly demonstrates Emilie at her very best.

Ferdinann West and Erlend Torheim both attended Limpi in 20/21 and started the production/writing duo Earl&West shortly after graduating. Since then they've had cuts with several artists including Broiler, Den BB, Oskar Westerlin, and Kissi. They have also contributed vocals on several songs by Ballinciage including “Tante” and “Beklager”.

Earl&West have an artist project called PandaPanda that debuted on the top 5 single “Det eneste jeg vil er å ha det feat” by Broiler.

Born in the small town of Langesund along the south coast of Norway, CVG (Carl-Viktor Guttormsen) is one of the most sought after up-and-coming producers and live musical directors in Norway. After years of developing and leading the live band and show for twin-sensation Marcus & Martinus, who sold out arenas across Europe, CVG decided to take a step back from his career as a Musical Director and live guitarist in order to focus on his ambitions as a producer.

Since then, he has earned three #1 singles in Norway and had both commercial and critical successes with artists such as Astrid S (including #1 single “Når Snøen Smelter”), Emma Steinbakken (including the #1 singles “Jeg glemmer deg aldri” and “Floden”), Ruben, Bernhoft, and Emelie Hollow.

The small town of Verdal in Norway is not an obvious place to search for music’s next big thing. Truthfully, it’s not somewhere to go looking for much at all. “It’s a very small place,” shrugs 21-year-old Anders Aakerhus – otherwise known to you, me, and, soon enough, the world as plxntkid. “It’s a town of maybe 15,000 people. There’s a cinema, a couple of grocery stores. Trondheim, the nearest big city, is two and a half hours drive away. Oslo, where I now live, is eight hours away. You are very cut off in Verdal.”

Asked what there is for young people to do in a town so isolated, Anders replies simply, “Hang out with your friends and play X-Box.” As for anything approaching a music scene? Well, there’s a local community centre “where you can go and learn to play instruments”, Anders explains, or there’s the annual local festival sees revellers dress up in “early 1900s farm clothes and drive tractors through the streets” to the sound of country music.

How, then, plxntkid has built a loyal following of fans, amassed some 5 million global streams and recently signed with legendary label Epitaph Records – all from his bedroom – is a story of both this most ordinary of places and Anders’ extraordinary talents.

That story begins with a mother’s love of AC/DC. “I loved the energy of it,” Anders smiles. His parents weren’t musical themselves but, aged nine, on Christmas Day he unwrapped a guitar that had been sat waiting for him under the tree. Soon he was taking lessons and dabbling in bands. He bashfully laughs at the memory of being onstage at the age of 13 and valiantly plucking away at covers of Pink Floyd and Guns N’ Roses, his eyes nervously fixed to the floor.

If you were to ask Anders around this time where his foremost passion lay, he would likely have responded not with music, but Taekwondo; his prodigious martial-art talent seeing him regularly compete in – and win – regional and national tournaments.

Yet it was also around the age of 16 that Anders’ journey would take a sharp turn, when the engaging but shy young man was diagnosed with OCD and anxiety. “Part of my OCD is about germs,” he explains, “which meant I couldn’t handle being around people as they were sweating, and that kind of stuff, so I chose not to continue with the Taekwondo.”

In its place came music. By now, Anders had discovered punk rock, and the sounds of Sum 41, blink-182 and Green Day, along with the emo, post-hardcore and metalcore sounds of bands such as Pierce The Veil and Bring Me The Horizon. “It was all so different from what I had heard,” he explains.

None of his friends, however, shared in the music he was discovering, or the seriousness with which he was now taking it. “That’s when I discovered the Soundcloud community,” he explains. “I had always grown up around computers, as my dad is a huge computer nerd, so I got some money and I bought myself some speakers, a microphone and some music software.” Crucially, the community offered the socially-awkward Anders a necessary anonymity. He hid his music from those nearest to him (even going so far as to tell his mum he was simply singing along to music when she inquired as to the noise coming out of his bedroom), instead turning to new online friendships and YouTube to learn his craft. “I was embarrassed at the time, and I didn’t want anyone to know I was making music. But the SoundCloud community is very supportive. I could make my music under a [pseudonym] name; I would send other members my music or ask them how to do something if I didn’t know. It’s a great community.”

At first, Anders’ low-fi beats were purely instrumental; after a year or two of experimenting with sounds, he found the desire to introduce vocals. “I simply wrote what I was feeling at the time,” he says. “Because I wasn’t really writing as <me>, it gave me somewhere to talk about anxiety, frustration, or girls. I just wrote what was in my head.”

Doing so was about more than simply penning lyrics, too. “I used to go to therapists to discuss my anxiety, but after years of trying different therapies and techniques, I didn’t find anything that worked,” he reveals. “A big part of coping is my music; I think it’s unlikely that I would be making music if I didn’t have these problems. Writing lyrics about what is going on in my head was the best therapy for me.”

The music of plxntkid today bears all the hallmarks of Anders’ earliest experimentations –the accessibility, vulnerability and relatability that first attracted attention from a burgeoning online fanbase to songs about “love, depression and loneliness”. That connection was immediate, unique, and sincere. “A big part of why I still continue to make music is because it is not just for me anymore,” Anders says. “I regularly have people message me saying that my song is helping them through a rough time, and that is one of my biggest motivators for making music. I think a very large amount of people struggle with depression, anxiety, or trauma.”

Lovespeake is the solo project of Norwegian songwriter Alex Pavelich, and has featured on releases by David Guetta, Tungevaag, KSHMR, and Timmy Trumpet. Most recently, Lovespeake can be heard on the German radio hit "Tastes Like Summertime" by Off Key Junior.