Helena Gao, the Midnight Sun songwriter going viral in China

Helena Gao, Gao Dan Dan (2026)

“I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Copenhagen… but it’s pretty white,” says Danish-born, half-Chinese singer-producer Helena Gao, laughing in between spoonfuls of froyo in the late-night Shanghai café she’s dialled in from. “My hometown of Aarhus is even more homogenous, and being a minority in such a homogenous place makes you wish you could just conform to that homogeneity. I spent so long trying to suppress the Chinese side of myself.”

Gao is explaining how reconnecting with her Chinese heritage led to her latest EP, Gao Dan Dan (released September 10), a bilingual EDM-pop project that has recently found surprise virality in her homeland – and also landed her in some hot water. The first step in all of this, however, came when Gao relocated to Copenhagen to study at the city’s prestigious Rhythmic Music Conservatory (RMC). “That changed a lot for me, I met a lot of mixed-heritage people and it was really inspiring,” Gao continues. “Then, someone started showing me Chinese electronic labels like Genome and SVBKVLT and it made me want to see the ‘motherland’ for myself.”

While her previous releases sat closer to the ethereal, alt-pop soundscapes of fellow RMC graduate Erika de Casier, it was through exploring China’s emerging club circuit that Gao Dan Dan’s glacial electronic soundscapes started to take form. She’d attend storied SVBKVLT-affiliated nightclub ALL in 2023 on her own, obsessively recording the sounds and dancefloor interactions she found there on her Voice Memos phone app. In fact, the first track on the project, stuttering hyperpop cut “Wo Sao Ni” (‘Scan Me’), is a direct homage to these experiences – referring to the practice of ‘scanning’ the contact details of people you meet on a night in China’s big cities.

Midway through this journey of self-discovery, however, Gao found herself on a separate side-quest that landed her back in Scandinavia: co-writing Grammy-nominated hit “Midnight Sun” with Zara Larsson. “That slowly changed my life,” Gao recalls. “The opportunity came about through [fellow Midnight Sun collaborator] Margo XS. We’d made a few demos together in LA, and Zara’s team asked Margo if she knew any songwriters. We did ‘Midnight Sun’ on the first trip I came on and then I just kept getting invited back.”

“What’s been so fun is that it’s kind of a sleeper hit,” Gao says about the song that led to her co-writing nine out of the ten tracks on Larsson’s Midnight Sun album, and directly feature on the “Saturn’s Return” remix. “The video went viral a year after the song came out and now it’s like, ‘Oh I’m a successful songwriter’. I feel like I’ve become successful while doing nothing. But the way that Zara works has been so inspiring. You hear a lot of people being like, ‘Oh I’m a big-shot manager now’, but it’s actually Zara who had to put in all the work, making all the decisions. I’ve learned a lot from that.”

All of these experiences have informed Gao Dan Dan, a sort of Mandarin-speaking midpoint between Zara Larsson-style hit songwriting, and fluid, Oklou-coded electronic production. There’s the slow and sensual bass tremors of “Lao Wai” (‘Foreigner’) – an anthem for foreigners retracing cultural roots the world over; and the screeching, SOPHIE-tinged synths of “niu bi”. But, on one track in particular, Gao’s naïve exploration of the Mandarin language landed her in some trouble: “lao shi” (‘Teacher’). To Western listeners, the track’s bubbly, EDM-pop palette, chibi-fied Mandarin chorus and catchy, TikTok-ready dance routine might seem fairly lighthearted – over on Douyin, however, it’s become another matter entirely.

“I put the dance routine on Chinese TikTok and it instantly went to ‘Top 3 Challenges’,” she recalls of her first upload on the platform. “I can’t read Chinese so I was asking people what it meant and they were like, ‘It’s super viral, bro, most people pay to get that’. I thought it was a good thing, but then people started arguing in the comments. The song has even been taken off some Chinese streaming platforms because the people who don’t like the track have started reporting it.”

The controversy originates in Gao’s use of the slang word ‘teacher’, playfully used between friends in China’s big, tier one cities. In “lao shi”, however, the phrase is used to describe a sexual awakening, with its chorus imploring: “Yeah teacher can you teach me how to love?” and, later, “Show me how to slide my fingers / Always optimizing pleasure.” “People made it about student-teacher relationships!” Gao explains in disbelief, interrupting her usually bubbly persona. “There was also a Taiwanese girl who wrote a memoir about a student-teacher relationship, and later committed suicide. People started commenting her name on my videos.”

But, while Gao emphasises that the misunderstanding was partly fuelled by differing uses of the term, it also helped her discover a newfound purpose as an artist. In China, Gao tells me, people rarely talk about sex – even between partners – while, in Denmark, “people talk about that shit.” Elsewhere, she explains that Chinese people rarely appear online without a beauty filter and how she aims to show up as “something a little more chaotic.” “I found I have a unique position as an artist,” she concludes. “I can use my position to showcase all the fun aspects of Chinese culture to the west, but also vice versa. Growing up in Denmark we were very free, and I thought maybe I can bring those sorts of sensibilities to China.”

At its core, it’s a story of Gao reconciling the dual heritages that had once seemed so incompatible – and just a few weeks ago this journey came full circle. “I have a fan who’s been super active in promoting my music – shout out Chris!” she explains. “He’s half-Filipino, half-Danish, literally from my hometown of Aarhus, and he recently messaged me saying that my journey inspired him to start learning Tagalog. I was like ‘That’s fucking crazy!’ I feel like I finally found out my bigger purpose.” Through Gao Dan Dan, Gao has become the role model she needed all those years ago

Gao Dan Dan is out now on After All Records.

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