RIVER today releases her debut album A dying source via Bushido, a part of Pub Crawl Recordings. The album was created together with producers Johannes Henriksson, August Vinberg and Richard Anderson and follows the singles and videos of the past year, characterized by nostalgia, surrealism, and a quiet unease. The album was completed after a long writing process and the decision to abandon earlier material when she found a more personal musical direction in the studio.
During the work on "Infected mind" the singer started over, leaving behind what she had developed in previous years. She heard no immediate reference point in the sound. "This album has brought me closer to my core where I no longer need to use RIVER as a shield to allow myself to follow my intuition and sense of play."
The artist name is a play on her last name, Sommarström, and for her is associated with the earth, the rhythms of nature, and the constant flow of water. She had kept her musical ambitions to herself and has described both stage fright and, as a middle child, a tendency to avoid the limelight. According to her, the years in a role character eventually helped her reach a point where it felt natural to be true to herself.
Among her earliest musical influences were her father's vinyl collection and Elvis Presley's songs, which she recalls moved her already as a child. Her involvement in music deepened after her father's death, when she was seventeen years old. She left Gothenburg and traveled before settling in San Miguel de Allende in Mexico. There, she appeared in musicals and led a jazz and blues band for two years. She has said that alcohol and drug abuse shortened her stay. After a period with Alcoholics Anonymous, she returned to Stockholm to begin developing the project.
"My dog" is released together with the album and is accompanied by a video in which she portrays the seven deadly sins through different versions of herself. She calls it an experiment and the hardest video she has made, describing the result as a form of performance art.
The previous tracks "Paradise", "City of thirst" and "Change" contributed to establishing her within alternative pop. Over the year, she has been played repeatedly on P3, where Navid Bavey described her as "a love child of Mazzy Star and Prince". Among her live performances are Brilliant Minds and a club performance at Debaser.
Critics have highlighted both her songwriting and the visual character of the works. Get Some Magazine called the debut "an epic breakthrough both lyrically and sonically". Odalisque Magazine described it as a moment of liberation, a quiet acceptance of change and an embracing of the unknown in her artistic development. Festivalrykten praised an expression described as personal, cinematic and steadily standing on its own.