Sarah Klang is ready for her close-up

“It’s horrible to think back on, but I remember thinking that I was just too lazy to have an eating disorder, like I didn’t have the strength to be bulimic, and that’s a dark, dark thought.”

She’s not wrong, and surely not alone in that way of thinking either, but it feels more like a sign of the times than of any teenage failing. Born in Gothenburg in the summer of 1992, Klang came of age at the tail end of a pretty bleak time for women, in which the cultural momentum of feminism had run headlong into a rising tide of misogyny and left scrambling to make sense of what happened.

While lad culture was particularly toxic in Britain, the deeply sexist media landscape that allowed it to flourish had its mirror even in supposedly forward-thinking Sweden. By age 14, she says she didn’t have a single friend who wasn’t on a diet or thinking about dieting, thumbing through glossy magazines between classes, internalising every distorted ideal.

It’s an experience that she captures so humanly and clearly on the title track of her fifth album, Beautiful Woman, recalling how those same magazines were her sexual awakening – even as she’d be killing herself doing hundreds of abdominal crunches a day, skipping lunch and running through the local park. “Trying to navigate something so big as sexuality at that age is just impossible,” she says, laughing. “But I think that teenagers being so stupid is part of what makes those years so funny and special.”

Now 32, Klang is a firm believer that sadness and humour go hand in hand, though she doesn’t necessarily see being funny as a defence mechanism per se. It’s not as deliberate as that. Besides, the ticklish parts of her writing are often hiding in plain sight, with no knowing wink to show the way. The visuals are another story, but, for me, that’s part of what makes Klang so interesting. She rarely writes around a topic just to wrap it up with an elaborate lyrical bow. Songs like “Beautiful Woman” and recent single “Childhood” are, by her own admission, lyrically quite direct with no hidden messages. She simply tells it like it is, like it was, or how she hopes it will be, and it simply lands.

Klang’s first four albums – Love in the Milky Way (2018), Creamy Blue (2019), Virgo (2021), and Mercedes (2023) – were all made within a small and close-knit circle of collaborators in Sweden, including Theodor Stocks and her high school best friend Kevin Andersson. It was Andersson who first steered Klang in the direction of “the vintage, poppy Americana sound” that has seen her win two Swedish Grammis and branded, for better or worse, as Sweden’s queen of country.

Klang was already a huge fan of folk artist Daniel Norgren, so it felt natural for her to explore a similar, acoustic guitar-led sound. “I was very young when we made the first album, and nobody at that age is really 100% sure what they want to do,” she says. “But I feel like I started off in the world that I was meant to be in, and every album has naturally been an evolution from that.”

Klang’s singing has evolved gradually too, from the mannered, airy melancholy of Love in the Milky Way through to the bright and playful twang of Mercedes, but Beautiful Woman is her biggest vocal leap yet. Her voice has always been wonderfully deep, but there’s an expressiveness to these ten songs that feels so immediate, so close-up and creamy.

It’s hard to say how much of that is the absence of reverb (something that she’s always leaned on in the past) and how much is performance, but it just hits different. In a way, it feels like she’s taken on a character of sorts; in another, it feels like the first time on record that we’ve ever really heard her. You wouldn’t call it raw as such – these are warmly burnished songs – but the reward is in the details she might have previously buried: a voice crack here, a half-swallowed syllable there. The risk has paid off in spades.

A few days before we speak, Klang was taking risks again, performing with the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra on a much bigger stage than she’s used to and ticking a box that, less than a decade ago, would have felt too far-fetched to even dream of. “It felt so far away from where I had come from,” she says, explaining how as a music school student she would often skip class to rehearse for and play shows in local clubs and bars. “I can feel a bit less confident in fancy places, but we made it work and it was amazing.”

Since then she’s been preparing for an album launch show in Stockholm, while also being mum to her young daughter who’s home from preschool with the flu. “It’s been a hectic day,” she says, with a slightly weary smile, and it’s not long before the “little troll” herself wanders in with some toys she wants to show mamma.

Where Klang’s last album was all about motherhood, with all its pitfalls and pleasures, Beautiful Woman casts its net wider to the whole of womanhood – or at least what she’s experienced so far – and the constantly shifting relationship that women have with their bodies and their sense of self in a world constructed first and foremost for men. While the album isn’t specifically plotted as a journey, the bookends of “Beautiful Woman” and closing track “I Have Everything” offer a neat before and after that illuminates her current state of gratefulness in relation to the precarious self-image of her youth.

“That’s kind of a new thing in my life,” she says. “It can be hard to have gratefulness when you’re younger, or at least it was for me. It’s taken me some years to get there because I had to learn that it’s something you actually need to practice. For a long time that just felt so corny to me, and I guess it was a coming-of-age thing. I had to go through a whole process first.”

She pauses and smiles. “I’m still in that a little bit, and I don’t think I’m ever gonna get to the point where I am out of it completely, but I feel like it’s important to be grateful. I have a family now, and a working career in music, and that’s all I ever wanted, so thank you universe.”

Klang should be thanking herself just as fulsomely, having set the wheels of her fifth album in motion a full year before the fourth was even out. She’d fallen in love with the self-titled debut from US trio Bonny Light Horseman – Anaïs Mitchell, Eric D. Johnson, and Josh Kaufman – and was particularly smitten with the Johnson-led version of the traditional folk song “Deep in Love” (“still one of the best songs I’ve ever heard”). So when the band rolled into Gothenburg in August 2022 to open the first day of the city’s long-running Way Out West Festival, a meeting was arranged.

“I was told that he really wanted to meet me, but when we sat down it was very quiet. I said something like, ‘So you wanted to talk to me?’ and he said ‘no’,” she says, laughing. “But he was very nice and we ended up having a drink and talking about everything.”

Klang had no real expectations from the meeting, until out of the blue one afternoon a few months later Johnson called to say how much he’d loved listening to her first three albums while out on tour, and would she like to work with him. A short time later, she was on a plane to L.A. to write with Johnson at his studio, where the songs began to flow. “I hadn’t tried to write with anyone else before that, except Kevin and Theo, but when the opportunity came along I just took it. I was very ready to take another step, I think.”

As a producer, Johnson has little interest in piecing songs together from endless takes and separately recorded stems, and everything on Beautiful Woman was recorded live off the floor with the whole band. “His vibe was very different,” says Klang, recalling her initial discomfort in recording her vocals in only three or four takes.

“I’ve always been very controlling in how I record my singing, often using a lot of reverb on my voice because without that it just wasn’t really that comfortable to listen to,” she adds. “But Eric was like, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, you’re being weird.’ So I just had to trust him, which was scary at first and gave me a lot of anxiety, but eventually I realised he had a point and stopped texting him all the time about re-recording and stuff.” Speaking on their dream-come-true duet on “Last Forever”, she adds: “I just love the way he sings. It’s really nasal. It’s sharp and loud. He’s just so authentic and it’s very freeing to hear that.”

I ask if Klang considers herself a bit of a people-pleaser and she instantly agrees, pointing to her childhood and what she calls “classic abandonment issues.” She tells the story of first meeting her manager and how her reaction to him wanting to sign her was just short of offering him a bigger percentage to do it.

With Beautiful Woman, though, there’s the beginnings of a shift. There’s less anxiety now about bringing someone new into the circle and trusting her own instincts. “Meeting Eric and making this album, I got a little bit more confidence because it’s actually built on my songwriting and my voice, and it’s opened up so much for me,” she says. “Now I feel like I can basically take those things wherever I want to. I can write with other people without having to get so attached to them. ”

These days, when Klang’s anxiety spikes, she feels better equipped to re-centre herself by coming back to gratitude, and by focusing on things she can control or influence in a material way. She describes how consuming so much violence and cruelty on social media in recent years left her feeling incredibly stressed and unwell, waking up at nights to vomit quietly in the bathroom, and needing to step back from that.

“My body had this huge reaction and at first I didn’t understand why,” she says. “But as somebody said, watching a genocide being filmed is like the craziest Black Mirror episode ever, but it’s real. For a while I couldn’t even pick up my phone because I was so anxious about what I was going to see, and I feel like people don’t really want to discuss the effects of that. I understand it, though, because you don’t want to make it about yourself.”

Klang is all too aware of her privilege, living safely with Mercedes and her dad in a city like Gothenburg, far from any conflict. But Sweden has its problems too: gang violence, a rise in everyday misogyny, and escalating anti-immigrant attacks. Only hours before we speak, a white Swedish gunman attacked an adult education centre in the city of Örebro, killing 10 people and wounding six more, many of whom had an immigrant background.

“There’s a very strange vibe in Sweden now,” she explains. “People are becoming quite aggressive and angry, and some are going crazy. The sad thing is that the backlash is against people who don’t have anything to do with why these people are angry, especially women. That’s how it always goes.”

Going forward, Klang hopes to pour her energies outside of music into her local community where she can perhaps make a visible difference, rather than screaming into the algorithmic void. She also hopes to never write another song about her childhood years – literally the whole theme of “Childhood” – saying, “There’s only so many years that you want to be in therapy. I would love to be done with dwelling on that stuff and just move along.”

At the same time, she knows that a will doesn’t always come with a way, and that trying to outrun your traumas and patterns of behaviour is often just setting yourself up to fail. That’s partly what “Go to the Sun” is about, after all: the feeling of wanting to be free, to let go of the hurt, and finally become the person that you’d like to be, only to fall at a self-inflicted hurdle. “I feel like it’s easier said than done,” she says of shedding the past. “But I have definitely come to a point in my life where I see it as a possibility.”

“I know that the responsibility is on me, which is another very dark revelation,” she adds, laughing. “It would be so nice if it was somebody else’s job, but unfortunately it’s me who has to do it.”