If the Nusrat and Gabriel record was morning light through a cracked door, The Brothel is the same door at midnight — and someone has changed all the furniture.
Susanne Sundfør was thirty when she made this, already two albums deep into a reputation as Norway’s most serious pop songwriter, and she arrived at The Brothel by doing something rare: she actually listened. Not just to Western art rock or Nordic folk, but outward — to the Islamic devotional textures, the quarter-tone ornaments, the sustained breath of a tradition that treats melody as a vehicle for something older than melody. You hear it immediately in the opening passages, where the production refuses to resolve into anything comfortable.
The Room It Was Made In
The album was recorded at Duper Studios in Bergen and Propeller Recordings in Oslo, with Sundfør producing alongside Lars Håvard Haugen. That Bergen lineage matters. The city has a way of putting weather into recordings — dampness, coastal grey, a certain patience with silence. Engineer Lasse Passage kept the low end unusually wide for a pop record, giving the bass synths and the processed strings a kind of subterranean weight you feel before you identify it.
There is no conventional rhythm section to speak of on most tracks. What sounds like percussion is often treated piano attack, or a tabla sample looped into something barely recognizable. It is exactly the kind of sleight of hand that Gabriel’s team employed on Rated PG — where Nusrat’s voice became an instrument operating in a tradition of trance, and the surrounding production bent itself toward that gravity rather than trying to domesticate it.
Sundfør does the inverse. Her voice — clean, Scandinavian, classically trained — becomes the Western element dropped into an Eastern-inflected architecture. She is the outsider here, which is where the tension lives.
What’s Actually Happening Harmonically
The key track is “Fade Away,” which opens on a drone that could have been lifted from a Qawwali session in Lahore, before resolving — never fully — into something that reads as art-pop. The chord movement is modal, almost liturgical, and Sundfør sings over it with the control of someone who understands that restraint is the move.
“Delirious” does something similar with texture: layered synth pads that behave less like chords and more like held breath. The Eastern influence is less about instrumentation at this point and more about attitude — toward time, toward resolution, toward the idea that a song should arrive somewhere. The Brothel consistently refuses.
This is an album comfortable with not landing.
That is either the thing that will get you, or it will make you impatient. I’ll say plainly: it got me. There is a version of this record that tries to sand down the edges and move units in Norway, and Sundfør simply didn’t make it. She made the harder thing. She made the record Nusrat and Gabriel’s morning session was pointing toward — the cold-climate answer to a hot-country question about what happens when devotion meets electronics and neither blinks.
She followed this with Ten Love Songs in 2015 as well — a bigger, brasher synth-pop statement that got far more attention internationally. Most people came to her backward, through that record. Coming forward, through The Brothel first, you hear where she was when she still needed to be strange. That version of Susanne Sundfør is harder to find and worth the time.
Put it on after the kid is in bed. Give it the full run, lights low.