FOLKESANGE OUT MARCH 20 ON RELAPSE RECORDS
Today Danish composer and multi-instrumentalist, Myrkur has revealed her new video and single, “Leaves of Yggdrasil“. Amalie Bruuns’s delicate and sweeping vocals paired with the violin, piano, lyre and nyckelharpa make for a lullaby-like song which she notes, “is very dear to my heart.” She continues, “I wrote Leaves of Yggdrasil about being apart from the one you love because of circumstances that are completely out of your control. The Norns weave the fates of Gods and man and sometimes that means very tough life situations. I wanted to create a song with the feeling of an old folk-tale, but with words that resonated with my own life today.”
For the video, Amalie rejoined forces with filmmaker Mats Ek to create something entirely different from anything she’s ever done. Watch below as they take you into a visual universe somewhere outside of nature and more into the otherworldly.
| Listen & Share: “Leaves of Yggdrasil” (Official Music Video) |
| Listen & Share: “Leaves of Yggdrasil” on all digital platforms |
Myrkur’s Amalie Bruun has always paved her own path and challenged underground preconceptions of heavy genres. Just after newfound motherhood, Bruun set out on a journey into the very heart of the Scandinavian culture that marked her own childhood with the release of her new album, Folkesange. Due out March 20 via Relapse Records, Folkesange relinquishes black metal for a refined yet far-reaching evocation of traditional folk, combining songs ancient and new to sublimely resonant effect.
Storytelling, rites of passage, and the invocation of a continuity that passes through time and generation are all part of folk music’s tapestry, and Folkesange taps into all these currents in their most essential form. In part a purist’s approach to the genre, free from over-interpretation and fusion, the use of Kulning (an ancient Scandinavian herding call) and traditional instruments throughout, such as nyckelharpa, lyre and mandola offer a deeper, more tactile connection to their source, an unbroken line of communication back to the past.
But the album is no museum piece; it resonates in the here and now, aided by the spacious production of Heilung member and musical collaborator Christopher Juul. Cinematic yet intimate, Folkesange exists in a state of boundless reverie, bourne by string-led drones, cyclical, elegiac rhythms and Bruun‘s frictionless voice, all carrier signals for deep-rooted, ancestral memories, and associations felt on an elemental level.
An immersive experience in its own right, but also belonging to a wider, pagan folk-based renaissance that has attracted a devoted following worldwide, Folkesange answers a need that has become ever more pressing in turbulent times. A zeroing in on a resonance that is both intrinsic and enduring, it’s a rediscovery of personal grounding, and an experience that reaches beyond culture to remind us of a shared, deeply rooted inheritance. A tuning fork that binds the personal and the universal, Folkesange is a reminder that the most transcendent experiences are those closest to home.