This story is taken from the spring 2026 issue of Dazed, which is on sale internationally now. Order a copy of the magazine here.

I first saw 25-year-old Finnish singer Pehmoaino perform at the primordial Temppeliaukio Church during Helsinki Music Week last year. She sat on a cushion on the floor, backed by an electronic synthesiser to her left and a cellist to her right, the church’s rock-hewn ceiling towering above her. Having arrived in the country just hours before, Aino’s ethereal, echoing voice instantly reminded me of the scenes I’d seen on the flight in: verdant forests, fields of reindeer, snow-capped mountains; beauties from another time. An attendee next to me jokingly described Aino and her boyfriend, premier Finnish rapper MELO, as the ‘Beyoncé and Jay-Z of Finland’ – but she certainly didn’t seem like any pop star I was familiar with.

Indeed, Aino has had a winding path to stardom. Her career began when she won Finland’s The Voice Kids talent show at just 12 years old, but it’s an experience she holds bittersweet memories of today. “I was so scared to be there; it wasn’t my idea,” Aino tells Dazed, who had to retake the first round after having a panic attack and not being able to perform. “As a child, I was always singing. My family saw that and really wanted me to sing for people, but it was such a personal thing for me. I’m very neurodivergent. When people bring that [experience] up now, I struggle to realise that I was actually really there.” 

Rather than leaning into a Zara Larsson-like pop career after winning the competition, Aino went inward, rediscovering her personal relationship with creativity through poetry. She did eventually return to music, but it was on her own terms – and there is some small degree of irony to be found in the fact that it led her to an even greater level of success. At age 19, Pehmoaino released her debut single “haluun takas mun perhoset” (“I want my butterflies back”), a delicate yet grandiose piano-backed ode to childhood innocence, and it became one of the first Finnish songs to go viral on TikTok. “It’s weird and fun that I’ve become a pretty well-known name in Finland,” says Aino. “It’s something I’ve been thinking about with my producer – how did it go this way?” 

While all this might seem like a very reluctant approach to success, it’s actually in keeping with Finnish culture itself, which Aino says is all about “working hard and being humble”. With her pensive alt-pop releases regularly accruing streams in the tens of millions (for context, there are only five million Finnish speakers total on Earth), yet frequently downplaying her success as “weird”, Pehmoaino is a very Finnish type of pop star indeed. 

Below, she explains her love for lyrics, her connection to nature and what makes Finland different to neighbouring Sweden. 

What makes your approach to music unique?

Pehmoaino: I think that’s because I come from poetry, so I’ve always liked lyrics. My grandma wrote poems, and she was very dramatic. She was pretty sick when I was a small child, and I started making poems just to make her happier. My mum is a therapist, so I’ve grown up thinking about emotions and the human brain a lot. Because I always come up with the lyrics and the melody first, and then produce the track around it, I think that makes [my music] different to Iskelmä [Finland’s approach to pop music], which is the most listened to genre in Finland. 

You’ve spoken about making music and poetry from a young age. What inspired you growing up? 

Pehmoaino: I think poets and musicians who had lyrics that really stood out. We had a piano at home, and my dad used to play it a lot, but my parents didn’t listen to a lot of music, so I would just write poems and sing them. My mom told me that I learned to sing before I knew how to speak. My aunt’s husband used to record me secretly – he put a microphone in a teddy. He was like, ‘This teddy is sick, so you have to sing to them’. I was like one-year-old but, but when I sang words, I could pronounce them correctly. In between songs, when I was talking to my parents, I couldn’t speak at all. That’s interesting, it tells me that there’s something about my brain… lyrics are how I learned how to speak.

Your name is Aino, so where does the ‘Pehmo’ come from? 

Pehmoaino: ‘Pehmo’ means soft. It’s kind of ironic, because I am soft, but I’m also pretty tough. The joke is that I’m saying things pretty softly, but I’m also talking about abuse and attachment issues and not being able to love someone even if they love you because you hate yourself. ‘Soft’ is a name I’ve been using for years online. Through my teenage years, my friends would call me ‘loser’ Aino – they would use different adjectives in front of Aino – but then when I started releasing music, I was like, ‘Shit, guess Pehmoaino has stuck’.

When I visited Finland last year for Helsinki Music Week, I was shocked by the solidarity across such different styles in the Finnish music scene. What do you think makes Finnish music special?

Pehmoaino: Even though I’ve always been good at singing, I’ve also been a bit of an outcast. I was bullied at school and stuff. Being from Finland, however, automatically makes you a bit of an outcast from the world, because we have a language that only five million people speak, and they’re almost all in Finland. Sometimes, if you make music in English when your first language is Finnish, people don’t like that, because being humble is a really important thing in our culture. They automatically think you’re trying to be international or something.

I make music in Finnish, but I also support my friends who make it in English. As I said, being Finnish automatically makes you a world outsider. We have a very beautiful scene here. The Helsinki music scene really started during Covid and now the younger generation is making a lot of cool things. We were doing parties outdoors under bridges and in the woods. People [internationally] are missing out by not speaking Finnish. 

It’s pretty dark all the time, so art is a pretty big way of surviving this dark country.

Do you think there’s a connection between the Finnish landscape and the sounds that come out? Like your music is very big and open…

Pehmoaino: Yes, that's Finland! We have a lot of forest and big, wide spaces. I grew up in Oulu,  in Meri-Lappi, which means ‘Ocean Lapland’. I love being in nature. I’ve grown up around a lot of sheep, sitting in the middle and singing songs to them. I also think boredom inspires me a lot, so I try to make space for boredom and to hang out in the woods. My grandma used to walk to school in paper shoes through nature. I’ve always been inspired by the women who came before me, as it all started with my grandma’s poems – so, being in nature has something spiritual in it. It lets me reconnect with them.

I also think this is a pretty inspiring country. It’s pretty dark all the time, so art is a big way of surviving this dark country.

I can’t help but think there’s a little bit of a parallel between you and neighbouring Swedish star Zara Larsson. You both won talent shows at a young age, but the music you make is obviously very different. Do you think that reflects differences in Swedish and Finnish culture? 

Pehmoaino: Sweden is like Finland’s older [sibling]; it’s more international. People joke that they’re trendier and dress better – Stockholm’s bigger than Helsinki and Finland is like the sadder version of Sweden. We have more woods and it’s greyer. 

But then, Bladee and Drain Gang, I think speak pretty well to the Finnish music culture. They speak to something we have in common rather than the Max Martin-style pop, you know? That’s something that Finland has also tried. The 50-year-olds try to make the Max Martin-style pop, but happy Finnish pop stars just don’t work out. The alternative scene in Finland does pretty well. 

Pehmoaino wears crepe dress Courrèges, archive Issey Miyake wool scarf and archive Jean Paul Gaultier mesh gloves 20Age Archive, Baignoire de Cartier quartz and gold watch Cartier, Hair and make-up Miika Kemppainen.

This story is taken from the spring 2026 issue of Dazed, which is on sale internationally now. Order a copy of the magazine here.