Vänersborg, Sweden · dance-pop · disco

Agnes

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Reinvented herself from talent-show winner into a disco auteur — string-swept, four-to-the-floor pop performed with total conviction.

Agnes was born in Vänersborg in 1988, the youngest of four children to an environmental engineer father and a nurse and social worker mother. She took up violin and joined a choir as a child, sang solo in front of an audience while still at school, and had her first one-on-one singing lessons at sixteen.

She won the second season of Swedish Idol in 2005 at seventeen, taking the title with 57 percent of the public vote after judges had twice passed her through despite weak public support earlier in the contest. Signed to Sony BMG, her debut single went straight to number one in Sweden, and her first two albums, Agnes and Stronger, both topped the Swedish chart.

After parting ways with Sony in 2008, she signed to the independent label Roxy Recordings and released Dance Love Pop, her most commercially successful record, which charted across Europe and sold roughly 200,000 copies worldwide. Its singles

Its singles "On and On" and "Release Me" became international hits; "Release Me" topped the Billboard Hot Dance Club Songs chart and reached number three in the United Kingdom, selling several million copies. She has named Stevie Wonder, Whitney Houston and Janet Jackson as formative influences, a lineage audible in the full-throated delivery of her later, string-driven disco records.

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