Artist: Myrkur
Album: Folkensange
Genre: (Nordic) Folk
Country: Denmark
Release Date: 20th of March, 2020
Released via Relapse Records / Sony
Myrkur, aka Amalie Bruun, is a project consisting of a musician who walks between the genres of Black Metal and Nordic Folk within the recent years . With a surprisingly new sound, good ideas and a beautiful voice, she captured the hearts of a lot of people by storm. Now, three years after Mareridt, she released her latest studio album Folkensange in March 2020 – but it isn’t a Black Metal / Folk combination, it’s a sole Folk album.
The twelve-song long album lets you enter a beautiful and melodic trip through songs that instantly trigger the feeling of “That’s Scandinavian!”. The 47-minutes-long album is dreamy and playful, but also sad and heart-breaking – and it will make every Folk fan happy. For me, both of the highlights of this album are “Leaves of Yggdrasil” and “Svea”. “Leaves of Yggdrasil” was one of the pre-album releases and culminates in the strength of the album. Beautiful lyrics, great usage of traditional instruments like Nyckelharpa and Mandola, combinated with this beautiful voice. Awesome and another positive point (at least to some) – the lyrics are in English. You can understand this track, the rest of the album is only understandable for people who are able to understand the Scandinavian languages. Amalie Brunn sets you into the framework of sitting in front of a bonfire in at a classy Scandinavian location when listening to “Svea”. I hummed and sang the song an entire day, what other kind of quality approvement did you need! Overall, I think, anyway what kind of folk you like or dislike, you will find several songs on this album you are gonna get along with – and maybe one or two songs that are not as strong as the rest, but that’s a question of taste.
Folkensange will be one of the best (Nordic) Folk albums of 2020. The playfulness, the voice of Amalie Bruun and the theme are good enough to play this high ground. Fans of the genre should clearly listen to this album, people who think Heilung might be “a step too far” will have fun with Myrkur’s new album as well. With this album, Myrkur became one of the most interesting musicians at the moment to me: she can play several genres and likes to enter new musical ways to have us enjoy it with her ideas.
★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆
9/10
Favorite track:
“Leaves of Yggdrasil”
As usual, we added the favorite track(s) to our Transcended Review Playlist 2020.
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