We’ve written about Emilie Østebø’s Bo Milli twice in recent months. “A very youthful mix of apathy, anxiety and self-confidence,” is how we described first single ‘How It Is‘. “Think Soccer Mommy meets The Beths, telling tales of hungover bus rides, dancing to The Strokes and a lingering unease that persists despite everything.” Second track ‘FOMO‘ “tap[ped] into the zeitgeist to explore the pitfalls of love in the digital age, where everything is recorded and curated for your viewing no matter how uncomfortable it might be.” What united both tracks was the sense of authenticity and with which Bo Milli approaches contemporary issues—dispatches on our times straight from the trenches of Generation Z.
New single ‘Good Kid’ sees the Bergen-based artist turn her attention to perhaps the most pressing problem of all—The climate emergency and our responsibility to act upon it. “My parents’ reaction to my own civil disobedience has pretty much been: ‘you’re a good kid, you don’t have to change the world’,” Bo Milli explains, echoing the chorus of the song. But as the extent of the climate’s collapse becomes clearer each day, such an opinion seems increasingly fanciful. The world in which previous generations lived no longer exists no matter how much we might hope for it. “I think younger people implicitly live as if that world still exists — if I get some kind of education, I’ll land a steady job, at some point I’ll settle down, I’ll grow old and have a pension. But I think, if we interrogate these presumptions, this future doesn’t add up.”
“The lines in the chorus are essentially what I’m tempted to say to myself when I want to throw in the towel and see everything play out”, Bo Milli explains. “It’s a logic that’s difficult to argue with, but nevertheless, I think it’s the wrong conclusion. It’s an attitude that disregards my responsibility, and it doesn’t feel good to live like that.”