Hello Saferide to release final album in the Spring

UPDATE: Annika has come forward to say that she is in fact NOT quitting music after all. Hooray! “Shame on you, newspapers. You can do better than this. For example, to call my label and ask if it is true,” she wrote on her blog, adding “So I started studying. Big deal. 99.9% of all those who are doing music are doing something else too.” [rough translation]

Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet reports the sad news that Annika Norlin of Hello Saferide/Säkert! plans to quit music for good after finding the pressure of her commercial success too much to handle. Norlin has confessed in previous interviews to having had panic attacks following her 2006 breakthrough and recently opened up about how her memory had become so poor that she couldn’t even recognise old friends in the street when they said hello. “In the end, I could not get out of bed in the morning. It was not fun anymore,” she revealed.

Norlin has already enrolled on a five-year degree in psychology at Umeå University, which she says she is enjoying: [rough translation] “What I like about studying is that the music becomes a hobby. Then you get more pleasure out of it. You do things for the right reasons.”

As previously reported, Säkert! release their second album Facit in September, with a third and final Hello Saferide album, recorded at the same time, coming in the Spring.

Tagged facit, hello saferide, säkert!