"The Faroe Islands' first international superstar" - PROG
"Evanescence-esque local hero" - Variety
"Incorporates the lyrics and musical styles of traditional Faroese music to international recognition" - The Guardian
Eivør comes from one of the smallest places on the planet. She grew up in a village of 400 people, tucked away among the Faroe Islands. But her music, which is shaped by the natural wonders of her homeland, has brought her all over the world. She's performed at Europe's biggest festivals and co-composed the soundtracks to Netflix's hit series The Last Kingdom and the award-winning video game God of War: Ragnarök.
Today, Eivør is making the next leap in her musical journey by announcing her new album. ENN ties back to her Nordic roots. All eight songs are sung in Faroese and most of the lyrics were written with the island's esteemed poet Marjun Syderbø Kjelnæs. But even though it translates in English as "Still", ENN stands out amid her two decades-long discography as a bold new venture. The album leans heavier into dark electronics and cosmic orchestration, all while reconnecting our hearts' desires with the primal beauty of the earth.
"ENN is the most nuanced and experimental album that I've created to date", Eivør says. "The songs range from symphonic space opera vibes to more beat-driven and dark electronic moods. I wanted to explore the links between humanity and nature; the primal urges of the heart, the undying desires of the human flesh and the endless struggle we choose to endure in order to achieve our goals. All of this goes on while our planet hurtles through space, setting the stage for our battlegrounds, but also our sanctuaries. Because even though there is an unyielding tide of destruction at the core of this journey, there are also oases of hope and comfort lingering within its blue embrace. The earth speaks out, and the heart listens".
Watch the video for lead single “Jarðartrá” below.
ENN comes out June 14 on Season of Mist.
Pre-order & Stream
https://orcd.co/eivorjadartrapresave
“Jarðartrá” is an especially fitting first single. Just like the extreme contrasts that define life on the Faroe Islands, the song is dark yet glistening, swirling but propulsive. It's also one of the very first songs that Eivør wrote for ENN.
"Back in 2021, I went to Tjørnuvík, a tiny village in the Faroe Islands", Eivør says. Though arriving with no plans other than to entertain the thought of a possible side project, she realized that her ventures into classical music and beatmaking were actually the start of her new album.
“Jarðartrá” is one of the most beat-oriented songs on ENN. But as the video subtly suggests with the thump of Eivør's hand drum, its steady electronic pulse stems from more ancient origins. "When I wrote this song, I envisioned the earth in its rawest elements: oceans, volcanoes, storms, soil", remembers Eivør. "We all have echoes of these elements within us, but maybe we tend to forget that we are part of nature and its endless circle of decay and growth".
The video's laser light show glistens like a pearl necklace, but “Jarðartrá” beckons us away from our own greed and destruction and back into the warm embrace of mother nature. In English, the title translates as "Death Lust", a primordial desire to return to the earth. The deep swells of strings and gently turning piano are rooted in an old Faroese folk melody.
"Come lie down in my blue embrace", Eivør sings, reaching into her operatic register, as if beckoning us toward the light. Her voice sails so high and with such ease that it sends a shiver of astonishment up the spine once you realize that what we're hearing is from her earliest demos.
"I recorded the vocals for "“Jarðartrá" in an old abandoned Tjørnuvík school during the middle of the night", Eivør says. "I tried to re-do them later, but I couldn't capture the same feeling".
The video for "Jarðartrá” was directed by Einar Egils (www.einaregils.com)
Additional credits
DOP - Anton Smári Gunnarsson
Producer - Eydís Evensen
Executive Producer - Einar Egilsson
Prod Co. - Indy Productions
AC - Sigfús Heiðar
Gaffer - Óttar Andri Óttarsson
Grip - Gústaf Evensen
Wardrobe - Diana Breckmann
Makeup - Sigrún Sig
Hair stylist - Ásgeir Hjartarson
Set builder - Þorvaldur Betri & Gústaf Evensen
Laser operator - Gabríel Brynjar Bjarkason
Post - Einar Egilsson
Media rental - Kukl
Special thanks: Geir Bjarnason, Úlfur Grönvold
Photo by Sigga Ella
Next month, Eivør is serving as the special guest for Heilung during the Nordic collective's spellbinding rituals in Washington, D.C. and Red Rocks. From there, the Faroese star will shoot across Europe on a headlining tour with fellow label mate Sylvaine in tow before linking up again with Heilung in the land down under.
"My band and I can't wait to start this new chapter with you and perform later this year", says Eivør. "These tours will bring ENN all over the world - from the United States to Germany, The Netherlands, Belgium, UK, Ireland, France, Switzerland, Austria, Hungary, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, New Zealand and Australia".
Get tickets at eivor.com
In preparation for their tour together, Eivør and Sylvaine put together a playlist of their favorite songs. Get in the mood with some of the choice cuts off Nova and the soundtracks to The Last Kingdom and God of War Ragnarök.
Stream: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7k4ImSEttiL9O6gOQ1tmrn
2024 US Tour Dates Supporting Heilung
April 17 – Washington, D.C. @ DAR Constitution Hall w/ special guest Eivør [TICKETS]
April 23 – Morrison, CO @ Red Rocks Amphitheater w/ special guest Eivør [SOLD OUT]
Eivør calls her Nordic home in the remote Faroe Islands a landscape of extremes. Sitting in the North Atlantic Ocean just above Scotland and southeast of Iceland, with a total population of about 50,000, the climate is “full of contrasts—very dark, heavy winters and bright summers.” Growing up in a small village there, of about 400 people, it’s those contrasts that have inspired Eivør’s music throughout her career, as well as the Faroe Islands’ intense and still-vibrant connection to its own folk music traditions. “A very strong part of Faroese culture is singing together—anywhere people gather, there will be singing,” Eivør explains. “When you listen to old Faroese traditional music, it’s sung acapella and takes you back to its Renaissance roots. It’s pure, expressive, and untamed.”
Often considered to be one of the most prolific and unique Nordic artists of her generation, Eivør has released 11 studio albums to date, crossing musical genres and always pushing the bounds of the expected. Awarded with the Nordic Council Music Price in 2021, Eivør’s musical journey continues to fascinate.
As a young teenager, Eivør was immersed in the tight-knit local music scene, playing with 20-something musicians in jazz bands as well as rock bands influenced by Portishead, Radiohead, Massive Attack, Sigur Rós and similar acts.
By 16, Eivør released her debut solo collection of Faroese-sung folk-pop. One year later, she left home to study classical singing in Reykjavík, Iceland—soon winning two Icelandic Music Awards for her sophomore album. She spent the ensuing years living in Copenhagen and building a career playing folk festivals, but by 2010, Eivør was ready for a change. Her daring Larva album eschewed the folksiness of her previous work for experimentation and electronics. “I needed to free myself from boxes,” she said. It was the beginning of a new chapter that continues with her richly atmospheric new album, ENN.
The process of ENN built on Eivør’s recent immersion into production and beat-making, but began with a return to classical music. She and her partner, the classical composer Tróndur Bogason, had decamped to a tiny Faroe Islands mountain village of 50 people, called Tjørnuvík with no agenda but to “write freely” for a possible side project. “Slowly I realized: I shouldn’t think about this as a side project,” Eivør said. “This is where I am at right now creatively.” The first track she worked on there became ENN’s melancholic closer, “Gaia,” which Eivør calls “a love hymn for the Earth” that reminded her of the Renaissance music she loved in her youth. On that trip, Eivør also wrote ENN’s opener, “Ein Klóta,” a song about “watching your world from afar” as it changes. “I felt I was making a concept album, in a sense, about the Earth, about our home, our planet. Then it developed into both nature but also human nature—both the outer and the inner landscape, and the struggles of the heart, the struggles between the Earth and humans.”
In recent years, Eivør has composed extensively for film, television and video games(The Last Kingdom, God of War) and the cinematic structures of those scores found their way in alongside the music’s propulsive beats, omnipresent rooting in Faroese folk, and the classical flourishes of her opera training. Some of the songs feel like vistas or panoramas moving unexpectedly. “After writing the first two more spacious tracks, the idea started to grow in my head of almost a space opera,” Eivør said. “I was like, what if this journey starts out in space, and you watch the Earth? And you’re so far away from everything that you ever knew? Where am I going? What is this adventure?” The result was a synthesis of her career to date—her curiosity about beat making and noisy expressiveness, combined with the purity of classical music and cinematic atmospheres—and that sonic biography plays out beautifully on ENN’s second track “Jardartra.” It begins with a lurching beat “almost like a heartbeat,” and Eivør wrote it from the Earth’s point of view, as if “Earth is calling on us in the midst of all our human greed and destruction and beckoning us to find our way back to her blue embrace.”
Most of the lyrics, sung entirely in Faroese, were penned in collaboration with the Faroese poet Marjun Syderbø Kjelnæs. Eivør calls the lyrics to the title track especially “hardcore.” The song is about war— “the wars that are going on in the world especially lately, but that have always been going on,” Eivør says, “and how to find a glimpse of light in this overwhelming darkness.” The guttural penultimate track, “Upp Úr Øskuni,” is a thrilling outlier mixing growling beatboxing with visceral throat singing (it’s certainly Eivør’s most metal moment). She considers “Upp Úr Øskuni” a beacon of female empowerment and solidarity. “I wanted to write about sisterhood and women supporting each other, and these raw female elements which are not pretty and not polite, just raw,”
Eivør says. “I wanted it to be wild and untamed. It’s quite witchy. When I wrote the song, I imagined a coven of witches from the past and the present all supporting each other, chanting to each other across the chasm of time.”
After independently releasing her music for many years, ENN marks Eivør’s debut for the metal label Season of Mist—and though her compositions sit outside of any one genre, she is happy to be embraced by the metal community. She identified a shared pagan sensibility in her television scores like The Last Kingdom. “I never felt I really fit into any box,” said Eivør. “I just have to do it my own way.” Recorded with her touring band in the Faroe Islands—where she now lives again, splitting time between her homeland and Denmark—Eivør called ENN “my most pleasurable and also most painful process. I felt that I was stepping into a place where I hadn’t been before, and that’s always scary because you don’t feel that you touch the ground. But it opens up your creativity and takes you to someplace new. It’s woven together all my experiences for the past 10 years, and it’s grounded me.”
Recording line-up
Eivør: Vocals, Guitars
Mattias Kapnas: Piano, Rhodes and Synths
Mikael Blak: Bass & Synths. Guitars on ‘Upp úr øskuni’
Per I Højgaard Petersen: Drums & Soundscaping
Strings performed by Lýra:
1st violin: Sigrún Harðardóttir
2nd violin: Sigrún Kristbjörg Jónsdóttir
Viola: Karl James Pestka
Cello: Unnur Jónsdóttir
Choir on ‘Ein klóta': Eivør, Tróndur, Hans Mols Mortensen, Greta Svabo Beck and Fred Ruddick
Recording studio
Studio Bloch (Faroe Islands), Hljóðritið (Iceland), Jardin Acoustique (France) and in Eivør’s portable studio in various corners of the world.
Production, engineering and recording
Produced & arranged by Eivør and Tróndur
Beat production by Eivør and Per I. Højgaard Petersen
Recorded and engineered by Theodor Kapnas at Studio Bloch (Faroe Islands)
Additional recordings and engineering by Fred Ruddick at Jardin Acoustique (France)
Strings recorded by Guðmundur Kristinn Jónsson and Gestur Sveinsson at Hljóðriti (Iceland)
Mixing
Theodor Kapnas
Mastering
Robin Schmidt at 24-96 Mastering
Creative direction
Eivør and Leif Podhajsky
Artwork
Leif Podhajsky
Photography
Sigga Ella
Additional landscape photography by Alessio Mesiano
Order & Stream: https://orcd.co/eivorjadartrapresave
Management contact:
Henning Dietz at Neu Management London - henning@neumanagement.com
Booking contact:
Luc Favié at Doomstar - luc@doomstarbookings.com
Follow Eivør:
https://www.eivor.com/
https://www.facebook.com/eivormusic/
https://www.instagram.com/eivormusic/?hl=en
https://eivor.bandcamp.com/
https://www.youtube.com/eivormusic
https://twitter.com/eivormusic
https://www.tiktok.com/@eivor_music
https://open.spotify.com/artist/2dB4ya2W1Gvng8gjWSPu2H?si=U-2hxkT9RjizmDg52Q-8kA&nd=1
