Sigrid’s Songwriting: The ‘Don’t Kill My Vibe’ Origin Story

Sigrid’s Songwriting: The “Don’t Kill My Vibe” Origin Story and the Ålesund Sessions

Every pop star has a breakthrough single. Few have one that doubles as a mission statement. When Sigrid released “Don’t Kill My Vibe” in February 2017, the song was not just a debut — it was a 20-year-old from Ålesund, Norway, telling the music industry exactly how she writes: personally, furiously, and on her own terms. The story of how that song was made, in bedrooms and writing rooms between Ålesund and Bergen, is the story of Sigrid’s entire songwriting philosophy.

The brother’s challenge

Sigrid Solbakk Raabe was born in Ålesund, on Norway’s west coast, into a deeply musical family. Her brother is a musician; her sister, she has said, has one of the most brilliant voices she knows. The family story that started everything is almost comically simple: at sixteen, Sigrid was performing cover versions of Adele songs at local shows when her brother told her to stop — and challenged her to write an original song she could perform at one of his gigs instead.

She wrote “Sun” in two weeks and performed it with him. The song got airplay on Norwegian radio, and she released it as her debut single in 2013 while still in high school. The sibling influence never left her process: her sister taught her to sing before she took formal lessons, her brother taught her guitar, and both of them still check her lyrics to make sure her English is proper. Songwriting, for Sigrid, began as a family activity — and in some ways it still is.

The writing session that started it all

The origin of “Don’t Kill My Vibe” is one of the most honestly told stories in modern pop. After her early Norwegian releases and a signing to Petroleum Records, Sigrid was put into writing sessions with outside producers — the standard industry machinery for developing a young artist. One of those sessions went badly. In interviews, she has described being belittled by older male producers in the room, feeling degraded and not even wanted there. She was furious with herself for not speaking up at the time.

She took that fury into her next session, with the Norwegian producer Martin Sjølie. As she told NME: “When we wrote ‘Don’t Kill My Vibe’, Martin Sjølie asked me what I’d been thinking about, and I started talking about this difficult previous session I’d been in. I could’ve described this upcoming moment of truth as a bad teenage novel but ok, short version: I almost killed that Mac keyboard due to angry writing.”

That image — a teenager hammering out a song in anger on a laptop keyboard — is the entire Sigrid method in miniature. She does not write from concepts or briefs. She writes from the feeling she is having right now, as directly as possible. “Everything I write is personal,” she told The Line of Best Fit. “I think I have one song that’s not personal. I think it’s easier to write about if you’ve felt it yourself.”

From piano ballad to pop detonation

The song did not arrive fully formed. The first version of “Don’t Kill My Vibe” was a piano ballad — just Sigrid and the instrument she writes on. It was only after listening back to the chorus that she and Sjølie decided it needed more production, and the track was rebuilt into the surging, percussive anthem the world heard: soft, building piano giving way to scattered beats and then the full-throated chorus, with its defiant chant of “I’m young, I don’t care, I won’t quit.”

The demo was sent to her manager, Geir Luedy, and it did its job. In September 2016, after label executives heard it, Sigrid signed with Island Records. The single was released on February 10, 2017, and the response was immediate: millions of streams, a New Music Friday spotlight, and the public approval of Elton John — the veteran new-music tastemaker whose endorsement has launched a dozen careers. The EP of the same name followed, and the BRITs Critics’ Choice award cemented her as 2018’s most tipped new artist.

The Bergen writing community

At eighteen, Sigrid moved from Ålesund to Bergen, and the city’s famously collaborative music scene became her laboratory. Norway’s music community is small — “everyone knows everyone,” as she has put it — and Bergen in particular runs on musicians playing in each other’s bands and writing in each other’s rooms. Her collaborators on the early EPs were fellow Norwegians: Sjølie, Askjell Solstrand (with whom she wrote the acoustic “Dynamite” in their first session together), and the Flint brothers.

This matters because it shaped her sound. Bergen’s scene rewards melody and directness over polish, and Sigrid’s writing reflects it: big choruses, plain-spoken lyrics, emotions stated rather than suggested. Her stated inspirations are telling — Adele for the big pop tune, early Coldplay, Joni Mitchell — but she has also said she draws from everything, including the Norwegian trap underground she was listening to in Bergen. The result is pop that feels handmade rather than manufactured.

Writing as self-defense

There is a thread running through Sigrid’s catalog that starts with “Don’t Kill My Vibe” and never really stops: the song as a response to being underestimated. “Business Dinners,” from her debut album Sucker Punch, was written about her experience meeting with London labels as a teenager — “You just want me to be pictures, numbers, figures, I’m just trying to be me.” “Fake Friends” calls out two-faced acquaintances. The targets change; the method doesn’t.

She has described herself as harsher as a songwriter than as a person: “I’m a lot harsher and meaner as a singer and a songwriter. I’ve not always been that fond of arguments in person, so I prefer to write about those feelings rather than screaming in someone’s face.” It is a disarming admission, and it explains the particular energy of her music — the feeling that every song is settling a score the polite version of her never would.

The process, in her own words

Asked to describe what makes a writing session work, Sigrid once said: “The beautiful thing about writing sessions is that you can click with a person 100%. I think it’s cliche for every songwriter to say, ‘Oh, I get to talk about my deepest emotions. This is my therapy.’ But it’s totally true. You get to talk about your feelings and where you’re at in your life in that moment.”

That is the Ålesund bedroom method, scaled up to the global stage: find the feeling, find a collaborator you trust completely, and write it as honestly as the moment allows. It started with a brother’s challenge at sixteen, detonated with an angry laptop session at twenty, and it remains one of the most direct songwriting voices in pop. Don’t kill her vibe — she’ll just write a hit about it.

The “Don’t Kill My Vibe” story, in dates

Sigrid’s songwriting breakthrough did not happen in a boardroom in London or Los Angeles. It happened because a session in Bergen went badly — and her brother told her to write about it. Here is the timeline around the song that made her.

The songs and their writing stories

What’s next for Sigrid’s songwriting

After two albums and an EP in quick succession, Sigrid’s songwriting has entered its second act: the defiance of “Don’t Kill My Vibe” has matured into the emotional generosity of How to Let Go. She has never shown interest in becoming a behind-the-scenes songwriter for other artists — her catalogue is the diary, and she is the only one who gets to read from it. A third album is the obvious next chapter, and if her history is any guide, it will be written the way everything else was: at a piano, in her own words, on her own terms.

FAQ

Did Sigrid write “Don’t Kill My Vibe” herself?

She co-wrote it with Norwegian producer Martin Sjølie, her longtime collaborator. The song was inspired by a real session in which older male songwriters patronised her — her brother suggested she write a song about the experience, and she did.

What is “Don’t Kill My Vibe” about?

It is about refusing to let other people diminish you. Sigrid has explained in interviews that it came from songwriters who belittled her in a writing session, and the lyric is her answer: a declaration that nobody gets to kill her vibe.

Does Sigrid write all her own songs?

Yes — she co-writes everything she releases and has said she would not record a song she had no hand in writing. Her core collaborator is Martin Sjølie, with additional sessions alongside a small circle of writers and producers.

Where does Sigrid write her music?

Much of it starts in Bergen, Norway, where she is part of a close-knit community of songwriters and producers. Her process typically begins at the piano with a melody and lyric before production is added.

What is Sigrid’s songwriting process?

By her own account, it starts with honesty: she writes about what she is actually feeling, usually beginning with piano and voice. “Don’t Kill My Vibe” is the textbook example — a bad day in a writing room became a global hit because she wrote exactly what happened.

Has Sigrid written songs for other artists?

She is not known as a songwriter-for-hire; her writing has stayed focused on her own records. Unlike many pop songwriters who split time between their own career and placements for others, Sigrid’s catalogue is entirely her own.

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