Helena Gao found her voice on the dancefloor

Opened as a state project by the Danish Ministry of Culture in 1986, what started as an old-school jazz conservatory evolved into a star-machine for alt-pop with the introduction of its composition course. Smerz, ML Buch, Astrid Sonne, and Erika de Casier are among its esteemed alumni, but poised to become the school’s next breakout star yet is Danish-Chinese singer, songwriter, and producer Helena Gao. Known best for her Grammy-nominated work on Zara Larsson’s Midnight Sun, Gao's solo efforts are now taking off in tandem, culminating in September’s explosive gao dan dan EP, a delightful bundle of forward-looking pop fit to bear the torch of the burgeoning scene surrounding Gao and her contemporaries.

These days, Gao is seldom actually in Denmark, save for the odd layover to see home friends and go to the dentist, but its influence on her remains. Mostly, she’s in Shanghai, her adopted home at the moment, with sporadic periods in London, as she begins to explore the “very early stages” of a longer-form release. Of course with gao dan dan, there will be stints as well in New York and Paris too for listening party playbacks of the record and then she’ll head to Korea to write some more, exploring the country’s world-renowned pop scene and seeing what comes of it. It’s the life of a popstar as one might imagine it would be. Gao is taking it all in — and doing it her way.

“I don’t think they were trying to, like, birth alt-pop," Gao tells me of her musical education at the RCM, "but it makes a lot of sense because the thing that’s really nice about that school is that it does take into account a wide range of eras. We’ll talk about Wagner or Bach or polyphonics and in the same class talk about Calvin Harris.”

“They just really enforce experimenting," she explains. “Even if you made a pop song, they’d be like, ‘What happens if you halve the BPM?’ I think that’s a very good way of looking at music — it’s something we do as research in some ways. Having that [mindset] in the way I view music has been very positive and [let me] keep up creating when I’m not inspired, because that’s often the hard part. We talked a lot at school about how you keep up a process when you don’t know what to do.”

Born in Aarhus, Denmark's second city, these experimental sensibilities instilled in Gao’s Danish upbringing and education were, she says, essential in shaping her creative worldview. She first came to pop music, after all, on the standard European diet of Eurovision, which she says were a “gateway.” From there, Kylie Minogue — lots of Kylie Minogue — and later Kelly Clarkson and Fergie. A sampling of pop greats. Later came Paramore — in a lonely phase in grade school — and Radiohead, both pulling her into darker, more mysterious musical territory.

“For the next year — maybe year and a half — I didn’t listen to anything other than Radiohead," she recals. “I would learn all the track lists, all the lyrics, and that was my first music obsession. When you’re in that pre-teen stage, you can really obsess over something. That was Radiohead for me. And it also became the reason why I started thinking I needed to become a musician.”

From there, Denmark’s robust welfare system and public arts funding provided a way forward. For a country of roughly six million, it punches far above its weight in cultural exports. As Gao points out, this is no accident. Take, for instance, the fact that Denmark has one of the highest festival-per-capita numbers in the world, meaning that even tiny towns often play host to the global cultural icons of the moment. Pair this with an extensive grant system, free college tuition, state support during study, and state-of-the-art facilities, and an environment is created in which young talents wanting to pursue music are given a material shot at it. Without the ever-present pressure of commerce — still perceivable, but not entirely oppressive; at least not as a student — the creative mind has time to thrive. “It makes you have more calmness around your process,” Gao says of the Danish system.

For around two years after graduating, Gao stayed in Denmark and hit the live scene playing keys for another Danish popstar and singing with dream-pop band Blue Foundation. At this time, she also began to put out her own solo work, with her earliest music — 2020’s Extended Adolescence EP — showcasing a sparse, songwriterly experimentalism. Slowly inching further into the world of pop, she  emerged in 2023 with the foundations of the glitchy sound she’s known for today.

Around this time, Gao also started travelling. Being a backing musician, she knew, wasn’t her goal, though she wasn’t entirely sure what the next play was. She began taking trips to Shanghai to explore the city’s club scene and her own heritage — trips that would eventually become a full-on move. Things still hadn’t yet fallen into place yet for Gao and she started to wonder if she might be better served by heading back to school to “do data analysis,” which, she said, was “so weird, because I’ve never had any interest in that.” She gave herself one more year to try, and if not, she was off to become a “woman in STEM.” (To note, she swore off postgraduate education in the humanities because she refused to be “more educated but more jobless.” Fair point.)

Still, she got to work bussing around — no small feat in that sprawling California metropolis — just seeing who was free. She started meeting people who had also moved to L.A. on whims and, for whom, it had actually worked out. She wrangled her manager, who helped introduce her to contacts in the city. Eventually, she got set up with Margo XS, cult-icon record producer and one half of deBasement, for a few sessions. She describes meeting Margo with the kind of fervor someone describes meeting their “other half,” and it’s hard not to come away assuming Margo and Helena’s creative partnership was just simply meant to be. Studio time was interspersed with long walks, talks about spirituality, fabulous parties, and Margo convincing Helena to stay her course with music.

“I found that very inspiring, and I was like, damn, I need to start being a little more spiritual,” Gao remembers. “That trip made me realise it doesn’t really matter what the statistics are. Faith is not meant to be a risk evaluation of reality. It’s meant to be something that makes you feel good and empowered.”

When Margo found herself attached to Zara Larsson’s then-unnamed fifth album shortly thereafter, Gao was one of the first people she recommended to bring in the studio with her. Margo played Larsson’s team some of the demos the pair had worked on together, and they were hooked.

“They really liked what me and Margo had done, and so I got flown out. In the first week, we made ‘Pretty Ugly’ and ‘Midnight Sun.’ Then, they just kept inviting us back,” Gao says.

Midnight Sun was itself a turning point not just for Gao personally but for pop generally. That a frontline major-label artist’s “last chance” album was being produced by, essentially, electropunks was somethig of an anomaly. The seeds of mainstream glitch were there thanks undeniably to Brat – but what Charli started, Midnight Sun proved out. It goes without saying the record is wacky and maximalist — who else is going to write, “Have you ever seen a pretty girl get ugly like this” — but that became its charm. People loved that Larsson wanted to be a star. They wanted to watch the performance of pop stardom, they wanted pop that was untamed and raw, and they wanted pop that gave itself permission to be a little — or a lot — freaky. 

Speaking in terms of Top 40-style pop, Midnight Sun is the ultimate realisation of what Helena Gao’s Copenhagen alma mater always sought to teach – it’s addictive in the way all good charting songs are — structurally flawless, theoretically tight — but it’s got unkempt rascal undertones that steer it away from conformity.

“We talked about Eurodance a lot, stuff like that,” Gao says of the record's major influences. “What was really cool as well about the process was seeing Zara come into her own as the curator of the project. From the first sessions, she would be a little bit more pensive because she was seeing what everyone was bringing and what we could make. But in the last couple of weeks of the process, she was just like, ‘I don’t like that, let’s do that.’ She was just so in control, and I think that’s what you can hear in the record as well — how much of herself is being put into it.”

“There’s so much music now," Gao continues. "More creators are coming in because it’s more approachable to become a creator, and it’s not as expensive to have all this fucking hardware, so more people can do it. But then, at some point, you start asking what you can do with all of it and whether you can do something more interesting and more exciting because you hear so much music all the time and, I actually think TikTok has been great for experimental pop because before you’d have gatekeepers who you’d have to beg to play you on the radio…. but TikTok, in a way, it’s like democracy because people can fuck with things that are different. The people who are the music nerds, the music lovers, and the people who are gonna be very vocal and passionate about music — that’s what they want.”

In the background of Midnight Sun, Gao was still creating for herself. After all, the goal of going to L.A. in the first place had been to work on her own project, and it wasn’t one she was willing to put down. Present too, at least initially, was the fear that her cuts might not make it on Zara’s final tracklist at all. Gao knew what she was doing with Zara was good, and she knew she had to trust herself, but she also didn’t want to be naïve. The promise of a hit — let alone inclusion — was never taken for granted 

“The good thing about [working for someone else] is you go for a week and then you have three weeks off to do your own thing… So, I had plenty of time,” she says. In that off time, she was putting down roots in Shanghai, getting pulled deep into the city’s nightlife and electronic circles. The club kids of China, she ended up finding, were doing it different — and perhaps better — than anywhere else.

“In the beginning when I was travelling to Shanghai, I felt like I had a lot of excuses or reasonings for it. People were telling me I could make it big in China, so I would be like, ‘Oh, that’s why I’m in China’.... like I was almost embarrassed,” she admits. But what really drew her to Shanghai was the people, the sense of profound belonging and rootedness that she found within its creative circles. A stint that was supposed to be three months turned into a year and a profound enmeshment with the city and its artistic core.

“Culture is such a big part of expressing yourself in China,” Gao says of the scene there. “Obviously, you can’t say everything on social media. We know there are different rules. But in culture, you can kind of do anything, and so I think the kids really identify with their taste and take a lot of pride in it. Even the DJs there are super experiments. And honestly everywhere, nightlife is just such an outlet.”

What Gao found in Shanghai’s cultural jungle gym was a scene that cared about music in the genuine sense. She found less posturing and more desire for connection. She found people who showed up to the DJ sets as much for the music as for the party, and crowds that dissected the minutiae of whatever show they’d just watched. She found she could direct message DJs and they’d actually message her back — one of said DJs is now a close personal friend — and that the novelty of connecting over shared musical passions never quite seems to wear off.

“Even though she wasn’t a big DJ, it just felt like it was such a sign that I could reach out to that scene by just doing it and that I didn’t have to be so scared," she admits. "Danish people are very scared of new people. We have to be, like, blackout drunk [to reach out to them]. But then I realised I could actually just reach out. And then I went to the club on my own for the first time, which I hadn’t because, as I said, in Denmark we’re very scared of those things. So then I just went out and talking to all these people, and the world felt like I could just grab it, in a way.”

That idea of nightlife as an outlet, club culture as experimental expression, and finding her own voice in an entirely new corner of the world were the building blocks of gao dan dan, an EP that sees Gao dive deep into the world of hyperpop-tinged dance music. It’s familiar terrain for fans of contemporaries like Oklou, A.G. Cook, and Eartheater — particularly on tracks “nanana” and “lao shi” — but it brings that Y2K diva energy into the mix. Listening through, you’ll simultaneously feel like a speed racer and a bubblegum-pop princess. Who says you can’t have it all?

Pop, in Gao’s hands, almost becomes grassroots. By emphasising its dance music elements, Gao leans into what made pop so great in the first place, which is the idea of a universal euphoric experience. “Pop is becoming more and more intangible in a way," She tells me. “The biggest celebrities we have are making pop music, and it’s such a big thing on the Internet and in discourse. Having this very tangible thing of how we connect around pop music and dance music is just a great way to bring pop back to the ground.

“If [these songs] just got played in a club once, it totally lived up to its function, and you created value in the world. It’s not just numbers or money or whatever. … I think that’s why dance has become such a big part of pop. Dance has this very tangible function in real life.”

The EP also marks the first time Gao has blended Mandarin and English into her music. Despite having a Chinese mother, growing up in Denmark — where, she points out, she still dealt with her fair share of “middle school racism” — she had little use for the language creatively. Even after moving to Shanghai, she was still resistant to releasing songs in Chinese, brushing off people who told her to game her way into making it “big in China.”

Her attraction to singing in Chinese had to come naturally, which, after enough time spent in Shanghai, it finally did. “Suddenly, it was the way the words and sentences rummaging around in my head had a little bit of Chinese in them,” she says. “Having inspiring experiences in Chinese kind of needed to happen for me to want to write in it.”

Writing in a different language also allowed her to bifurcate her parallel creative endeavours, allowing for a starker separation between the work she was producing for herself and the work she was producing for Zara and others. “It [was] a completely different language process than what I was doing for other people, so it was like, I couldn’t even compare it anymore, which I think was really healthy,” she says. The gao dan dan world was thus allowed to be hers and hers alone, coming into being with a sense of purity and purpose. 

That early, almost childlike love of art for art’s sake and creation enabled by rigour has never left her. It’s just that now, more people get to mosh along with the whims of her creation than ever before.