Åre Sessions soundtracks the fifth season

Meltwater carves through once dazzling white slopes to reveal the greys of gravel roads beneath, while flaxen fields of grass return to green and attract grazing reindeer belonging to local Sámi herders. Chairlifts slow to a halt. Days stretch out as seasonal workers strip off their thermals and enjoy a well-earned aperitif before heading home to larger cities.

This so-called fifth season of vårvinter (“spring-winter”) is a time to reflect on the passing of one cycle while looking forward to another. For most, this recalibration brings with it a calmer rhythm. But the town of Åre has other ideas. Every year on the weekend that April falls into May, this popular ski resort in the midwestern ridge of the country welcomes 10,000 visitors for Åre Sessions, a three-day festival hosted by the team behind Way Out West, where music and snowsports lovers party hard for what must be the biggest and loudest end of season blowout in Scandinavia.

At the festival’s eighth edition last week, perhaps the best snapshot of what Åre Sessions is about is found at an afterparty on Friday night. Hosted by DJ and producer Storken and friends, sweat streams down the walls of a rented apartment while deep arpeggiated bass lines of disco edits judder and slap; Jesper Tjäder, one of the world’s best freestyle skiers, is lifted by friends and spun around so close to the roof it looks like he’s attached to the ceiling fan.

If the thought of thousands of party goers swarming a charming mountain town sounds disruptive, it’s actually embedded in its history. Sort of. Once a remote town known for pilgrims passing along St. Olav’s Way to Trondheim in neighbouring Norway, the late 19th century saw Åre transformed by the arrival of the railway and a new class of wealthy visitors escaping the polluted air of Sweden’s growing cities. These so-called air guests arrived with plenty of free time and a desire for leisure, reshaping the town around their needs: hotels, restaurants, society pavilions, and so on.

While the soundtrack has certainly changed, today Åre continues to grow as it caters for visitors with krona in their pockets and an appetite for alpine pleasures. Even during Åre Sessions, by day its town centre has a typically cosy Scandinavian feel, its mostly wooden buildings painted in that classic Falun red with white piping. The festival’s hub, the hotel Holiday Club, sits calmly next to the sprawling Åresjön lake. But come evening, a whole spectrum of loud music spills out of these bars, restaurants, halls, and slopeside stages. I’m pretty sure the best soundsystem I hear all weekend is in a crêperie.

This variation in sound is one of Åre Sessions’s defining strengths. Fair or not, ski festivals and après-ski in general have a bit of a reputation for high-tempo, middle-of-the-road dance music that favours merry familiarity over anything fresh or progressive. That specifically European style of footstomping tracks with high-pitched vocals that summon bar staff to light sparklers and line up shots of some godforsaken herbal liquor; you get the picture. There is some of that here, truth be told, appeasing the large pool of students who want to start the party early and finish it last. But mostly the DJs spin either that distinctly Scandi strain of melodic, synth-heavy dance music or more modern, low-slung tech-house with understated grooves and heady layers.

At 720, an open-air stage on the slopes – your festival ticket is your skipass here – both of these styles can be found: the former championed by Adrian Lux, a leading name in the second wave of Swedish house in the early 2010s, while rising Stockholm selector Ana-My blends her signature minimal style with some hefty nu-disco to keep the afternoon vibes buoyant. Another buzzy producer from the capital, Killen., sets the place off on Saturday afternoon, as crowds of Arc’teryx beanie and Y2K sunglasses-wearing ravers rush the stage to circle him for the euphoric EDM banger “High Like The Sky”.

Besides the dancefloors on offer around town, Åre Sessions is also a great snapshot of the current Swedish pop and indie landscape. To make her Thursday evening performance, Fanny Avonne must have travelled to Åre straight from winning Newcomer of the Year at the Grammis (Swedish Grammy Awards) the night previous. Having once taken a glossy and international pop direction as Nova Miller, these new songs sung in her mother tongue have more space to breathe and show personality, giving credence to the fact that however much talent you come armed with, refining and reinvention is a constant process. “Kommer ta tid tills jag blir hel,” she sings over soulful blasts on “Växtvärk”. It will take time until I am whole.

Terra are another act who’ve honed their craft patiently over time, emerging from the Gothenburg scene a decade ago and growing into one of the country’s most in-demand indie rock bands. Their performance in an arena built into the Holiday Club hotel feels surprisingly momentous; I had never heard of them before, but songs like “Lust” and “Ingenting om dig” burst with anthemic familiarity, driven by locked-in rhythms and drenched in pleasing guitar tones that lend some kick and bite to what might otherwise border on syrupy. Throughout the rest of the year this venue is used for conferences and trade shows, but walking in and hearing every chorus of these songs sung back to them by thousands of voices makes it feel like it belongs to Terra. And yet, on Saturday evening it is equally hospitable to two veterans of very different corners of Swedish music, lifting the finger-picking intimacy of The Tallest Man On Earth’s career-spanning solo performance just as well as the club-ready disco-pop drama of Agnes’ latest incarnation.

Elsewhere in Åre, two standout performances span the extremes of volume. In the town’s small Old Church on Friday evening, Diane Emerita delivers a soft-edged blow of felt keys and a breathy vibrato; songs such as “Indigo Bruised” and “Value My Time” are accompanied by the creaking of pews as the audience leans in closer for her confessional. Between each song the Malmö-based singer-songwriter lets ambient chords linger like an interlude, talking slowly and thoughtfully in a way that makes the whole performance feel completely unguarded.

If the show’s serenity sticks with anyone in the hours that follow, at the turn of midnight Honningbarna rip it apart like a rabid dog. Words can only do so much to convey the brutal clout of this Norwegian band’s live show which, after 15 years, must be one of the best in Europe. There’s a pressure behind Edvard Valberg’s serrated vocals that threatens the glass lampshades on the ceiling of this hotel venue just as much as his kicking limbs, as he stumbles and surfs on top of the crowd. Playing plenty from their latest (and definitely ironically named album) Soft Spot, grimace-pulling bass lines combine with tight, frenzied drums to drive the chaos, while more melodic shoutalongs like “Festen som aldri stopper” act as a cathartic reprieve.

Honningbarna are veterans of the Nordic punk scene – this is a group who released a song called “Fri Palestina” (“Free Palestine”) in 2011 and have played it live ever since – but it still blows my mind that they’re not a part of the regular touring circuit here in the UK, which would surely eat them up. I told them as much after their performance at G! Festival a few years ago, to which they shrugged nonchalantly and said, “Book us then.” Fair enough.

Honningbarna’s performance at Åre Sessions feels completely out of place, but the festival is all the better for it. By the final evening, the boundaries between après-ski, festival, nightclub, and gig have melted like the fast-waning slopes above. But if ever in doubt, return to the party. The Negroni-loving duo Mind Enterprises are a perfect way to see out the festival, their Italo-disco both a nod to the ski-resort Europop of yesteryear and the kind of Todd Terje-style electronica that has long shaped nightlife in the Nordics. Those still around on Sunday afternoon head back up to 720 to catch Stuzzi, something of a boss-level party boy who refers to himself in the third person. On record, Linus Hasselberg’s cumbia-inspired songs have a kind of spacious, contemplative quality to them, but a live Stuzzi show is all airhorn effects and “Samba de Janeiro” World Cup ‘98 vibes – the kind that’s either the last thing you want to hear the day after a festival or the only thing that will get you through it.

As Åre Sessions reaches its final straight, the Storkenland guys spin some grooves that soon start to gentle. They’ve hosted a few more parties since there was a three-time Olympian hanging from their ceiling, and a weary contentment seems to fall on everyone as they look out into the valley. “Porcelain” by Moby is played as snowboarders seem to float in big air. It’s time to head down; one season might be ending, but another is about to begin.