Content warning: This interview includes discussion of sexual assault.
There are some songs that resonate somewhere deep inside, in a place where even full volume can’t reach.
Karoline Rose’s project Brutal Pop, under the artist name SUN, is more than metal and more than pop. Rose incorporates heavy metal into heartfelt, tortured ballads, slipping seamlessly between her beautiful, smooth singing voice and dark heavy-metal screams. Her music makes room for breath and movement, while still releasing something dark and fearsome.
“What I always struggle with as an artist is that you always have to explain where you belong and who you belong to,” Rose says. “And if you don’t, it seems like you don’t know what you’re doing.”
Rose is a multi-dimensional Franco-German artist, performer, and musician with a background in theatre, film and punk. She says her mom would bring her to perform in punk garage band shows in Germany when she was just thirteen. After finishing school, Rose went on to be a contemporary art and theatre performer, then to touring the US as a folk musician, while also performing in death metal bands. “There was a lot going on, all the time,” she says, laughing.
And now she teaches classes called Power Live and Power Voice at Music Academy International in France, showing students how to intensify their stage presence. But she says that real metal screaming is not something that can be taught. It has to come from somewhere deep inside.
Her first scream, she says, saved her life when she was sexually assaulted. “I managed to get out of the situation because this scream came out of me,” she says. “But it’s not really something I can teach.”
When Rose started performing Brutal Pop as a live act, she says many people in the industry weren’t sure how they felt about it. “People kept asking ‘Is it a concert? Is it an art piece? What is it?’ They were asking me to do something that I could pitch in one sentence,” she says.
The reason she chose to use a wireless mic was to be able to move freely on stage, to show that she’s both a pop performer and a metal musician. “I don’t just want to do a rock show, I want to do something more interesting,” she says.
Rose describes the freedom that she feels occupying an in-between space as an artist. “I think when you go outside of a category or in-between two, it’s magical,” she says. “Every time, it’s magic.”
I chose “Higher Fire” for the way that Rose swells and surges between sweet and fiery, until the last push, that brings the song to an intense, crushing ending. When I ask her about the song and what it means to her, she tells me a story about two strangers on a bus.
“I saw this guy with his business suit and briefcase and everything, and he looked out the window of the bus and he looked into the eyes of this girl, and there was this moment. You could see it in their eyes. It was like they were meant to be together,” she says. “But then the bus left.”
“When I saw this interaction I just needed to get it out and write about this wave of love that can happen to you, even when you don’t expect it,” she says. “It’s about that unconditional love that you feel in your stomach and you just have to scream it out.”
You can learn more about SUN here:
About The Curator - Abby Yaeger
Abby Yaeger always keeps an eye out for the weird and the wonderful. As a journalism student in Montreal, she walks whenever she can, usually without any specific destination in mind. Weather permitting, she’ll sometimes stop and sketch, or just sit and watch the people that pass by. As a writer, she hopes to support artists and creatives who see the world for the messy, strange, and wonderful place that it is.
