Swedish artists Cuntrie and Elsa Carmona collaborate to make misery a friend on “Dear Sadness”

Sadness is the most stable investment of our times – its popularity only ever rises, and two artists who know their way around it, Cuntrie (aka Ebba Gustaffson Ågren) and Elsa Carmona, share its spotlight on their collaborative new single “Dear Sadness”.

The track packs all the grandeur and scale of a hymn into a three-minute pop song, and the accompanying video cloaks the duo in an old-Hollywood-meets-Victorian-gothic aesthetic.

Collaborations between solo artists can be tricky, but on “Dear Sadness” they manage to sound in perfect sync, splitting the verses between them but sharing the song’s soaring chorus.

“Treating sadness as a friend was the inspiration for this song and the polarity of that,” explains Carmona. “I am a person who cries easily when I get too stressed and that usually becomes my healing. We wanted to play with the idea of sadness being a goddess that you pray to. Or turning sadness into a ritual as a way of gaining control. As a teen I actually had my own homemade Barbie voodoo doll, haha.”