I’m not sure exactly what the ‘Half Decade Addiction’ is that RABO has had to endure. I half suspected at first that it might conceivably have something to do with her penchant for surfing the world’s oceans and showing others how to do it; an activity that the pandemic forced her to give up, enabling her to turn her attention to singing instead, which was no bad thing, for her or us.
But at the end of the day in this song at least it is a person. It’s always a person.
She’s been featured twice here in NMC, and has twice been in the Top Songs listing at the end of the year too, landing the #2 spot this year with the super-catchy manic banger ‘A little too lost sometimes‘, which is no mean achievement for someone with so little prior professional experience of the music business until quite recently.
(I note that she has written songs for K-Pop artists but that doesn’t count. We only concern ourselves with N-Pop).
‘A little too lost sometimes‘ appears on this six song EP too, but I want to concentrate here on what for RABO is a quieter, more delicate track – but that’s only relative mind you – the opener, ‘Things’, coincidentally the first song she wrote for the EP.
There is an underlying, unstated tension in many of RABO’s songs and this one is no exception as she muses over the “hundreds of things that I miss” – the good, the bad and the ugly – following a relationship break-up.
Anger doesn’t seem to play a part in all this. She’s no Adele, Taylor Swift or Fiona Apple, on a mission of revenge, sticking pins into a voodoo doll of the guilty one.
But frustration rules the roost here and it is exemplified in a bridge that might be construed as no more or less than a scream of exasperation.
At times she sounds like Catatonia’s former singer Cerys Matthews and at others like Essex’s Princess of Darkness, Polly Scattergood and she has mastered the art of stating her case forcibly without it being too cloying, or annoying.
But it is that frustration that will really score with a teenage and early 20s audience in particular that can relate the most to it.
And boy, can this girl write a tune.
Which is collectively why, when more people have discovered her, and she’s curbed the vocal manic-ness that occasionally becomes a parody of itself, she will be a big star.
Trust me.
(Continues after the Spotify link)
In February 2026, RABO will play her very first headline shows in Oslo and Bergen:
• February 5th – Kulturhuset, Bergen
• February 7th – Parkteatret, Oslo
Find her on:
Website: www.itsrabomusic.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/itsrabomusic
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/itsrabomusic
