How singer Charlotte Dos Santos channels Norway’s winter landscapes on her ‘Neve Azul’ EP

“This place reminds me of my grandfather’s cabin,” says Brazilian-Norwegian singer Charlotte Dos Santos. “To me, that smell of pine walls and crackling firewood is Norway.” Shrouded in fog almost 500 metres above Oslo, Frognerseteren restaurant has been serving skiers since the 19th century. It’s here in a room that the country’s king sometimes reserves for dinner that the 35-year-old musician meets Monocle to discuss her latest EP, Neve Azul – her first major project since her debut album, Morpho, in 2022.

Recorded live to analogue tape and released by Dos Santos’s own label, True Node Records (named after an astrological term relating to the position of the lunar north node), the project is a departure from her first two albums. “I’ve always written and produced my music myself, doing all of my arrangements, but I missed collaborating,” she says. “I wanted to go back to the basics and have musicians playing live together in a room, like during my classical jazz training.”

The result is a five-song collection that feels more intentional, with a vintage sound. Its title track, “Neve Azul”, is a bossa-nova-infused ode to the Pyrenees, written after a long drive that Dos Santos once took through Spain and France. It was pieced together from ideas that she had while in the driver’s seat, looking out at azure-tinted ridges and cobalt crests in the distance. “That blue and my synaesthesia helped me to form the song right away,” she says.

Dos Santos, who was raised in the High North, says that its landscapes are intertwined with her imagination. “I grew up chasing trolls and fairies around my grandfather’s cabin,” she says. “I had this huge inner world.” Today she finds it easier to tap into that inner world in winter. As the Norwegian capital readies itself for plummeting temperatures and snow, habits among locals change. “It’s an introspective time,” she says of the months indoors. “I love hibernating, listening to beautiful music and writing. The quiet brings creativity.”

Given the inspiring landscape, why don’t we hear more music from Norway? Dos Santos is candid about how cultural codes can leave things feeling regimented. Janteloven is an informal but deeply internalised set of Scandinavian social norms that, she says, can dampen individuality. It’s a belief that has helped to ensure social harmony and equality – as well as a type of governance whose results are often the envy of Europe – but it doesn’t necessarily nurture individual talent. “You’re not supposed to think that you’re better than anyone,” says Dos Santos. “Teachers always told me that music wasn’t realistic for me. I was the only one in my class like this and the escapism in my music comes from that isolation.”

Dos Santos admits that she didn’t always feel Norwegian at school. Being half-Brazilian meant feeling out of place in such a homogeneous city. “So I followed my intuition and decided to lean into that difference,” she says. Her love of travelling and her studies took her to Brazil, the US, the UK, Germany and Spain, where creative expression was more celebrated. But the singer believes that Oslo and Norway as a whole are now changing.

“I hear a lot about how Norwegians are yearning for that big-city feeling,” she says. Fashion is usually the first sector to break through and Oslo’s streets are becoming less defined by pastels and reserved silhouettes. Donning a cosy alpaca scarf and glittering jewellery, Dos Santos is clearly part of this crowd, which is determined to liven up the capital city’s dress code. You needn’t be a cultural historian to note how changing fashions can be a sign of changing times. Still, now working independently from Oslo, with her biggest audiences in the US and the UK, Dos Santos does sometimes feel a sense of distance. “Building a team here can be daunting but the country’s creative scene is developing quickly.”

Live music is breaking new ground. Festivals are cropping up across the country, from fjord-side performances to celebrations in the Arctic Circle, such as Trevarefest. But as winter presses pause on such activities, the season gives artists a chance to recalibrate. The coming months will offer an opportunity for family dinners and celebration, with rakfisk (fermented fish) and pinnekjøtt (lamb) on the table as Dos Santos hosts “with Brazilian abundance”. And there’ll soon be more music for her to share too – she has recorded nine out of 12 songs for a project in 2026. As winter beats at the windows, Dos Santos seems in tune with her surroundings.

Read next: Cabin fever: Three stand-out holiday homes in Norway