Odd Beholder’s Like A Chore – released via cult Berlin label Sinnbus Records) – arrives out of necessity, rooted in lived experience and quiet systemic tension, the song and the wider Honest Work project, explores labour, care, and parenthood without reaching for easy answers.
Drawing from a specifically Swiss context while opening onto wider realities, the writing moves through ambiguity, fatigue, and empathy, framing work less as aspiration and more as survival.
In the conversation below, Odd Beholder (Daniela Weinmann) reflects on why these stories felt urgent, how distance sharpened the writing, and why acknowledging struggle can itself be an act of care.
I truly believe that if we showed young parents more love as a society, we will become happier and healthier people.
When did Like A Chore stop being an idea and start feeling necessary?
It felt necessary from the beginning. I believe that I have to write songs from a point of view which is not yet well explored, lyrically. So I want to talk about what perspectives I can bring to the table as a female Swiss songwriter. In 2025, only around 19 % of songwriters were female. Which means that it is likely that the realities of women are underrepresented in songs. Many pop musicians also cater to a very young audience, which limits what they can sing about, since a sixteen year old listener might not care about the realities of working mothers.
A lot of pop songs pretend that there are universal realities that they can address, but maybe in the case of Like A Chore, it helps to understand the Swiss context. In the nineties, not every woman in Switzerland was allowed to vote. So when I was born, women’s voter rights were still debated. Some areas in Switzerland were forced by international law to grant their female citizens voting rights. Now imagine that many topics that are traditionally associated with women’s realities, such as birthing and raising children, were not sufficiently represented in a parliament that was male. Until 1992 – I was eight back then – it was for example still legal to rape your wife.
Switzerland has come a long way since then. By the time I was 18, I was convinced that I had the same rights as my male class mates. But when my friends became dads, they were legally allowed to stay off work for one day. One day – that’s often not even long enough to give birth (this process can last 48 hours or more). Mothers, on the other hand, they “got” three months of paid leave. Which, I am aware, is a lot in comparison to other countries. But in a way, Swiss law still imagines women as the main parent and encourages them to rely on their partner as mainly a bread winner, and their jobs are seen as less important than the men’s. If men were given the same amount of parental leave, then the couple could make more modern arrangements.
When my friends started to have kids, I was moved by the vulnerability of the whole process. Giving birth was the most dangerous situation most of my female friends have ever been in – to have your body literally ripped up by a new human being. That we are canto do this as women is amazing in itself, but the body horrors of pregnancy and birth were played down in my male centric education. My community neither celebrates the wonders of it nor care to assist women enough through this life-changing situation. Their bodies were meticulously examined, but in their emotional process, they were abandoned and left to their own devices.
What’s more, is that I grew also aware of the incompatibility of work and family life. When I was young, I imagined stay at home moms as conservative or lazy. I was told hat I could live just like a man, if I wanted to. The reality was totally different. Some of my friends who became mothers abandoned their careers because it was too physically and mentally exhausting to do both. They loved their children and their new role, but it didn’t feel like a real choice. It was just the most “practical” thing to do, out house childcare is too expensive in Switzerland, so there is not really a financial incentive to go back to work. Most male friends of mine just continued to work full time, expecting their spouses to reduce their work. But there are many fields where you are not allowed to reduce your work hours. My cousin was working for a high profile law firm and she was told openly, that if she was ever to have kids, they would lay her off. Her partner worked at the same law firm. He never faced anything like that.
On the other hand, I think bringing your three month old to a child care facility is a heartbreaking thing, too. Back in the days, my co-worker came back after three months of parental leave, still visibly marked by the ordeal of birth and becoming a mother and was hiding in a storage room to pump breast milk. It was a sad image, as I imagined her new born yearning for her, needing her. Closeness was replaced with machines that look vaguely similar to devices in the (cow) milk industry. I mean it’s great these devices exist and help people cope, but it’s also not exactly a romantic ideal.
My song is not a political statement, but an invitation to feel these struggles and to honour them. To pay respects to young parents and acknowledge their dilemmas. I truly believe that if we showed young parents more love as a society, we will become happier and healthier people.
Honest Work frames labour as survival, not self-expression. Did making the album change how you see work — or just confirm the damage?
That’s an excellent question. It is an achievement for me to understand that work isn’t just self-expression. As a Swiss millennial, I grew up idealising work. As an artist, I even work to finance my work. So personally, I don’t experience work as only a means to an end, I enjoy a lot of moments of flow and inspiration, exchange of ideas, personal growth. I also think that many people experience these states, even outside of creative professions.
There is a lot to love about work. It is a very social practice; ideally, the work one does is of vital use to society, serves it, enhances it. I also try to see the work of the artist as a service to society. I don’t necessarily strive to express only myself as an artist, as I am not entirely convinced that “expressing myself” is all that I can contribute as an artist. I am a medium of societal struggles, I observe and I feel what I observe deeply, maybe on behalf of people who have less access to their emotions. I try to subject myself to an artistic project, it doesn’t necessarily revolve around me and my stories.
Coming back to the original question, I also notice that the question seems to propose a binary; EITHER it’s self-expression OR it’s survival. Self-expression sounds fun, but self-expression is a necessity, it’s a survival technique and it helps to life a fuller life, and that does not only apply to artists. Indeed, I wrote the album to express and expel something. I had to express a certain unease and I do think that it is changing me, now that I wrote all these, I admit, rather sad work songs.
The question points at a bias of the album: It is written from an angry and tired perspective. Exploitation is not all that work IS or has to be. But I spent my first twelve years of my life in a struggling working class neighbourhood, where people were really merely surviving – to them, the idea of work being a means to express myself would have felt completely absurd. How can you express yourself by delivering parcels? By working as a security guard? By stocking up supermarkets? These jobs give you nothing but survival, and they break your backs. I have written my album for people who are in situations like these, who don’t have many options for whatever reason – or feel like they don’t.
The song refuses easy answers about parenting and balance. Was ambiguity the point?
Ambiguity is not a point, it is a field. A field is something you explore and where you can position yourself. But yes, I see value in ambiguity, and I put some effort into the deconstruction of my opinions, because clinging to your own opinions obstructs your learning journey and restrains your relationship with others and the world. In the song Like a Chore I recognise that there is no “solution” – work and parenting need to be balanced, like so many other things in life. But in recognising the struggle, we can be empathetic, we can work towards offering both parenting genders support that will, in the long run, lead to a better society with less mental health problems. I don’t think a society of broken homes is beneficial for anyone. But I don’t propose any political measure with my song, I sing the blues of “child care under capitalism”. I think that’s fair enough.
You merge HR language with desperation. Is that satire — or just realism now?
I don’t know about “desperation”, but I definitely merge HR language with poetry. Yes, there is a satirical element to it, but it’s driven by artistic curiosity. I am exploring HR language in search of poetic or at least comedic potential. I acknowledge that the language of business permeates culture. I think it’s interesting to admit that, explore that, and question it. As an artist, I am treated like a product, but I am paid like a monk. I am tired of upholding the spiritual counterbalance, I am tempted to reflect the boredom of an overly strategic capitalistic society right back into it, let us praise flow charts and sing of benchmarks, let’s be honest about the gods of our time.
As for realism, I am not an expert on that. I have a hard time understanding what “realism” means. I find realism as an idea fascinating, an ethos of trying to be as truthful or measured as humanly possible. But as an artist, I see realism as an artistic tradition, which teaches us that every realism is art. It is an approximation which tends to forget that it’s fiction. I also don’t know if realism helps us out of the predicament we’re in. A lot of brutes like to think of themselves as “realists”. In many cases, self-proclaimed realists are very violent people who cannot deal with the diversity of human imagination. They have decided that what they think is “real”, and that everyone else has to abide by that. “Realism” for many today means preparation for WW3, and I am reluctant to agree, as I’d like to at least ask if it is but a self-fullfilling prophecy. That remains a very urgent question for us all to ask.
Do modern work systems leave any real space for care?
If only I was a sociologist instead of an artist, then I could answer that better. I think that individualists cultures that celebrate the individual hero, the fighter, the warrior, the lone genius, frame people who are working in the care sector as weak or even filthy: It’s work done by inferior people, often also tied to racial and gender injustices. But the modern work system would be nothing without them. It’s the very fundament of wealth. Modern work system are the reason more and more people require care. Yet, the ones who benefit from the life force of their workers are not willing pay for it. It’s extraction of health from the bottom up. Health is money, after all.
I think it’s interesting to ask why we care. If care is only lent to workers to keep them working, then it’s clearly aimed at sustaining modern work systems. In this regard there is a lot of space for care in modern work systems because they deeply rely on it, it’s basically maintenance. This is a submissive idea of care. But there could be another vision of care which leads to emancipation, which provides a better future for many.
Where does Internet Famous sit in this world — escape, trap, or just another shift?
Internet Famous asks what happens when meaning is monopolised and capitalised on – and how it affects worker struggles. Or put more plainly: If your boss owns all the communication tools and devices and can influence public opinion by, i.e. controlling which content gets what amount of reach, how can oppressed people understand their situation and organise? In my song I picture the realities of cloud workers in data centres. In my story, the low wage workers of companies like google dream of visibility (becoming “internet famous”), but visibility is managed by their boss. This adds to their desperation. On a more personal note, when I was an adolescent, the internet seemed like this anarchic player in the media landscape, a truly free medium. Now it’s almost unthinkable to see it as such. People on Tiktok are figuring out Algospeak to circumvent algorithmically enacted censorship – it’s a bizarre situation and I am nostalgic for times where the internet felt more like an even playing field.
This record feels more observational than Feel Better. Did distance make the writing sharper?
I take it this question as a compliment. Sharper as in more lyrically mature, I hope. I do think I wrote Honest Work from a different place than Feel Better, even though it was Feel Better who gave me the courage to tackle this project. I was truly amazed by the energy that Feel Better had freed; there were struggles I had to put in words in order to let go of them. In fact, this is why I started to write about work. I have a very toxic relationship with work. I’m addicted to it, I have put myself through a lot. In that regard, Honest Work feels just as personal, as real to me as Feel Better did. I don’t talk about myself but I have been through a lot of the stuff that I sing about. I need to heal something there.
You turn staff rooms and hospitals into lyrical spaces. Why do these places matter to you?
Because when I go to my release radar on Spotify, all that I am hearing are upper and middle class youth going through some minor and unspecific heart ache. I’m honestly sick of it. I am not a teenager anymore and, as Jay Z has said it better: Most of us grown ups have 99 problems. Or rather, I think the lives of the 99 percent deserve to be sung.
How did production restraint help translate fatigue, repetition, and pressure into sound?
I agree there is something mechanical about the production – I worked with a German producer called Douglas Greed. He grew up in East Germany, has seen the hardhip of both systems, communism and capitalism and is a very resilient and funny person. It’s a cliché but as a Swiss I can confirm that many German people I have met have an obsession with engineering, precision, efficiency, straightforwardness. In a way that aesthetic and work ethic felt very fitting to the concept of the album. At times I felt like a folk singer in a stiff exoskeleton of digital sounds. Which I think is a perfect set up to write today’s sad work songs for digitalised work environments.
In a culture obsessed with speed and growth, is endurance itself a form of resistance?
Is there growth without endurance? I think there are many ways to grow. I never managed to create a huge following as an artist, but this has also to do with decisions I took. I want to dream deep. And I still believe that someday someone will come across my body of work and will be amazed by the treasure trove. I am creating to my best ability, I see it as a duty – and I am humble enough to understand that marketing and promotion is its own art and I don’t understand it. I might not be a great artist after all, but I am not worried about that – bad art will heal the world, now that AI will be in charge of whatever the shallow and lazy deem “perfect“. I want to dream people into my life who answer my questions, who complete my omissions, who complicate my answers, who seduce me to make music.
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