Finnish at heart, global in ambition, Flow looks to the future

Two weeks before stepping on the main stage at Suvilahti, Olga Heikkala took her first ever pole dancing class. Already months into rehearsals, the Gen Z soap star turned Finnish-language banger magnet had decided that the show was missing one last dash of spice. Having won a fight to hire twenty dancers for the set, the math, as they say, was still not quite mathing. “I was, like, of course I’m gonna have a solo part,” she says, laughing – and to her credit, despite the understandable nerves, she unequivocally smashed it.Rooted in the school of What Would Lady Gaga Do, Heikkala’s gnostic pop ambition has taken her far in just a short whisker of time. It’s a rare feat to get booked for Flow, Finland’s flagship music festival, two years on the trot, let alone go from mid-size tent to its largest stage in one bedazzled leap. “I was so shook when I found out,” she says. “I knew then that this had to be the best show of my life, the biggest show in Finland, and I needed to give it my all.” Sign up to Best Fit's Substack for regular dispatches from the world of pop culture A few hundred feet away, Alec Moborg (aka Louie Blue) is playing out his own version of ambition. It may be a small...