On her debut album, melancholic Swedish sensation Sarah Assbring perform as El Perro del Mar, bringing together a haunting fragility and a desperate sadness with an incredible musical sense, with beautiful pop songs at its core.

On a sunny autumn day on Gothenburg, she explains that she doesn’t consider herself part of any particular scene. With Sweden having produced everything from rock – the Hives – to gloriously intelligent pop – the Cardigans, the Concretes - in the last ten years, Sarah is unsure why the Swedish music scene has exploded onto the international stage in that time.

“I don’t know what it is,” she admits. “There’s definitely some really good music coming out of Sweden and I don’t know why. It would be really strange to know if there’s a reason why.”

Perhaps it’s just that the rest of the world has caught up to what Sweden can offer.

“There’s a lot of different countries around the world that we don’t know very much about music-wise that probably have a lot of good music that haven’t come out to the rest of the world. It might be different kind of powers that control those things, I don’t know, but I think it’s coincidence.”

Chance happening is part of how the name El Perro del Mar – meaning ‘the dog of the sea’ – came to Sarah, as she sat on a Spanish beach. “It had to do with the state that I was in at the moment,” she says of the experience. “I was low, and depressed, and had been for quite some time. I hadn’t been making any music for quite some time and I happened to go to a Spanish island and I was at a loss, and all of a sudden there was a small stray dog walking up to me, and something happened within me when I saw that dog. It was a very strange moment, and the dog just became an expression that I held onto and found very personal and very important.

“I did it in a completely new way,” she says of making music after her epochal moment on the Spanish beach. “I decided that the name I should give this new music should be very personal and should be something that was very special, and the expression came to mind and I decided that that would be the most natural thing to name it.”

After that, Sarah returned to Sweden and began slowly piecing together the pieces that would become El Perro del Mar. After releasing a handful of singles and EPs in and around Sweden, Sarah first gained worldwide attention after she worked with fellow countryman Jens Lekman, releasing a split 10” vinyl on Jen’s American label Secretly Canadian. It promptly sold out in a matter of days, and suddenly the hype was building for the fragile beauty of El Perro del Mar.

As such, several of the numbers that appear on the self-titled El Perro del Mar hail from older releases, such as Candy, and date from March, 2004. While the songs are aging, Sarah says that, crucially, they don’t feel old, despite them being recorded some time ago. “I still feel incredibly close to them,” she says of the songs. “The view point that I have towards the music that I make is that it’s got to be very honest, and very simple – almost like a child’s song. That kind of music to me never gets outdated and never grows old, so the music is very close to my heart still and I think it will continue to be so.”

Having her debut album be a collection of EP tracks rather than a cohesive album is something that she thinks is quite strange, given that initially she did want her music to be released in bite-size chunks. “At that time I was very, very Do It Yourself, and doing things at a very indie level and that’s how I wanted my music to be and be taken as well.”

It was after this that the compilation was brought together as an album. The next trick is for Sarah to take the new material that she has been writing and record it, which is something she wants to do as soon as possible. Without the opportunity to return to the studio in a concentrated manner, time will always be a factor.

There’s a certain sadness in Sarah’s lyrics that is not portrayed in the music on El Perro del Mar, which for the most part sounds really positive, and happy. That juxtaposition of creation was something that was deliberately crafted. “I find that music has to have some kind of tension and almost a conflict,” she states, “between different kinds of moods and different kinds of sentiments.”

Sarah says that she finds that music isn’t really compelling if it doesn’t have that depth to it, and that’s contrasting feeling was what she wanted to explore and see what happens if the song isn’t completely based on one feeling or one expression – what happens to the listener when you listen to it? “Definitely that was one of my basic ideas,” she says. “As long as there’s some complexity and some kind of playfulness with what you do then that’s what I will continue to search for. That’s the way of me trying to get myself out of the sadness, so there’ll always be a mixture of both worlds.”

El Perro del Mar’s self-titled debut album is out now