Ulrika Mild says “I’m just a girl standing in front of a machine asking it to go ‘bleep bloop’…”

Under her alias of COMPUTE, she is one of the best kept secrets in Swedish electronic pop. Releasing her first EP ‘Dance With Me’ in 2004, longer form releases subsequently beamed forth with ‘This’ in 2009 and ‘The Distance’ in 2012.

COMPUTE went into hiatus as Mild raised a family with only occasional collaborations such as THE VOLT in 2016 with Eddie Bengtsson of PAGE and the more band-centric AMUSI in 2022. Then unexpectedly, 2023’s ‘the proper dimensions of a load bearing structure’ offered the first COMPUTE album for 11 years.

In 2025, Ulrika Mild has now entered a comparative roll; first came ‘NKI’, a summer protest record sung in Swedish pointing downward in its social criticism and honesty. But as the year comes to its conclusion, there is a new COMPUTE mini-album ‘The Pitch’, comprising of 6 new tracks in a return to expression in the English language.

Often afflicted by self-doubt and occasionally expressing her despair at releasing any new music at all, there is always hope and a captivating playfulness whenever Ulrika Mild gets behind her microphone and laptop. It is time to ”computify” again and for ‘The Pitch’, Mild has brought in external help for the first time with AMUSI bandmate Khyber Westlund coming in to mix and co-produce.

With a central theme of failure and loss running throughout ‘The Pitch’, ‘Close To Me’ is an impressively pensive song, embroiled in emotive tension both vocally and musically which does not forget the all-important hooks. Taking to honky tonk ivories for its intro, ‘Make It Right’ bursts into squelchy octave shifts and uplifting vocals for a delightfully odd sonic adventure. Elsewhere, the mightily percussive ‘Fail’ bursts with swooping avant synthpop stylings and creative distortion as our heroine fills the room with her Nordic expressionism.

More hypnotically bass-driven, ‘The Markings’ is glorious Scandi-synth with strange disconcerting noises, big beats, bubbling effects and plenty of melody sitting in harmony. With tasteful soprano operatics and held together with a thump and a throb, ‘Morning Still Comes’ journeys over to the Arctic horizon while switching to a more rhythmic crunch, the speedy arpeggiated mood of ‘Waking Hours’ sees Mild ominously ponder when “all this will one day be over…”

Dark without being totally doom-laden and utilising a more dynamic backbone than previous releases, ‘The Pitch’ is a satisfying melancholic body of work that continues the recent COMPUTE tradition to reflect the looming existential fears that threaten the modern world.

‘The Pitch’ is available digitally from https://recordu.lnk.to/pbLPmk

https://www.facebook.com/computopia

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https://soundcloud.com/compute

https://computopia.bandcamp.com/

Text by Chi Ming Lai
17th December 2025