The real fate of Ophelia, Shakespeare’s heroine who goes into deep grief after the death of her lover Hamlet? She drowns herself. As captured by painter John Everett Millais in 1851-1852, she’s surrounded by verdant greenery and flowers rich with colour. But while her milky, deathly pallor suggests death, her open hands and mouth hint at a hopefulness – that in death she will be reunited with a love that proved so ruinous.

“I’m drowning,” sings Andrea Thuesen on ‘Water In A Pond’, near the end of Snuggle‘s phenomenal debut Goodbyehouse. “Water in a pond, it feels like an ocean.” Like Ophelia, Thuesen is suffocated by sweet memories: endless summer days, the clear-eyed optimism of youth. The song’s dreamy waltz is actually about the slow death of childhood.

The circumstances that led to Thuesen and her musical partner Vilhem Strange to come together to create ‘Water in a Pond’ and its accompanying album Goodbyehouse are fittingly dour. “We were kind of lost when we started playing music together,” says Strange over Zoom, who speaks slowly like he’s walking in snow. “I was playing in (Danish band) Liss. And I had a really close relationship with the singer (Søren Holm). We would be in the studio all the time, making music together for many years. But then he died (in 2021, at the age of 25),” he pauses, “and there was a lot of music that never came out.”

From this tragedy and unfulfilled potential, he found another kindred spirit. “I found the same sort of songwriting connection with Andrea.” Today the duo finish each other’s sentences and have the sort of reverence for each other that comes from knowing that their creative kismet is rare. “We can experiment musically because this is a safe space for us,” Strange explains.

While her bandmate was mourning the slow unravelling of his former group, Thuesen was dealing with the sudden closure of a cafe she had a deep connection with. “It was like a second home,” she explains, “and when it closed it was like saying goodbye to a childhood home. I was very upset.” This and the fact Strange’s childhood home was being sold led to the album’s portmanteau – Goodbyehouse. “The title encapsulates a lot of these feelings of leaving home, being excited for the new but also feeling the melancholy and sadness.”

The band’s ascent has been retold as part of Copenhagen’s elegantly happening music scene with fellow artists Smerz, Elias Rønnenfelt, and Erika de Casier. But the reality is less collegiate and romantic. “It’s not part of this grand movement out of Copenhagen like Laurel Canyon, or something like that,” Thuesen explains. “You’ve got to realise that Copenhagen is this tiny city so it’s impossible to make music in this city without knowing each other in some way. The ones we know are like close work colleagues. But we’re not really part of that. We’re kind of the outsiders.”

Outsiders too in their inner circle: ‘Water in a Pond’ finds its protagonist recalling the carefree moments before adulthood dragged them under. “I wrote the lyrics at a time when a lot of my very close friends were starting to buy apartments with their partners and started talking about having kids,” Thuesen says. The song’s wistful lyrics (‘Days are passing by/ What seemed to last a lifetime/ Happened in the blink of an eye/ growing up is such a drag’) pop a nail into the red balloon of their childhood. “I felt like the ground under my feet was crumbling. I’m a very nostalgic person and I’m not very good at change. When things start to change I get very anxious.”

But if life gives you quarter-life-crisis flavoured lemons, what do you do but make lemonade? The duo replicated the complexity of these emotions with a sonic palette where futurism meets a ghostwalk through the past, Bacharachian orchestration meets pitch shifted vocal; shoegaze-ish hums meets Wild West tremolo and scaley murder ballad sounds. Thuesen’s plaintive vocal is equally collapsible: at times coquettish, filled with ennui or a stilted, performative sexiness.

Snuggle’s unique cut-and-paste working methods meant that the analog-meets-digital production gives Goodbyehouse a fresh sound. “A lot of these songs are written very traditionally like folk songs and then we take it to the studio,” Strange explains. “We have two guitars and we will improvise a lot, like long blocks of improvisation. Then I will cut up some bits of it,” He would do that same Jaws technique with the drums, which were recorded live, and then splice the preferred takes together.  “There are some mistakes in it, which makes it more analog than digital.”

Strange says he says he finds it hard to stop creating in the studio even coming up to a deadline. “We’re very good at changing stuff up until the end,” he says.” Like the day before we have to upload it I’ll be like: ‘Why don’t we reverse the sound of the drums?’ It’s kind of extreme but that’s how we work.” An example is ‘Driving Me Crazy’, which gained Chipmunk-like vocals in the final mix. “I remember hearing it and I was like ‘What?’ But now I love it, because it’s how we make music,” Thuesen says, “Equal parts very serious and very not serious.” There’s also a not-very-serious playfulness to the duos connection: at one point during a discussion about the introspective nature of songwriting Strange asks Thuesen “did you get inside my head?” to which she shoots back: “I’m inside your head baby!” without missing a beat.

The mix of musical experimentation and melancholy appealed to Hayley Williams, who namechecked Goodbyehouse and personally selected the band to support her on her first solo tour. “She wrote us a letter, it was very nice,” says Strange. “It makes me really happy and hopeful that an artist as big as her is still interested in investigating new music,” Thuesen says.

Before re-starting a tour which includes those Williams support dates, the band are at home, reflecting on their breakout year. “Apart from one show, we’d never played outside Denmark,” says Strange, “and I was surprised how many people showed up.” He sounds genuinely touched recounting the awe of a fan in Edinburgh who listened to Goodbyehouse on loop while coding a game for Rockstar. The duo have already started work on new music. “The crowd gets energy from the stage and you get energy on the stage from the crowd. We’re channelling some of that energy into writing new stuff,” says Strange. The new music is “rawer” and sounds more experimental than Goodbyehouse. “It’s double-edged because you want to make music for people that are into it, but it also sets a new expectation and you don’t want to disappoint anyone,” says Strange. “It’s very important to us to keep having this innocent way of making music.” It feels like they haven’t lost any of theirs yet.