One of the best ways for a small website based in the UK such as ourselves to check out what’s new and good out there in the Nordic regions is to look at the music festival line-ups, and it doesn’t get much better than by:Larm for great new artists.
So here’s 5 artists playing at by:Larm that we haven’t mentioned before at Nordic Music Review, and that all sound pretty good to us. If you’re going hopefully you’ll have chance to see them, and if you’re not, well this is a great chance to get listening ….
To discover loads more acts visit http://bylarm.no/music/
1) Leonov
I have no idea where we’ve been to miss this huge sprawling post rock band from Norway, who released their debut album back in 2014 and write epic industrial sized tracks packed full of huge guitars, swirling sounds and haunting vocals. Thankfully their appearance at By:Larm has brought them to our attention, and with perfect timing they’ve released a brand new single too, its called ‘Eucharist’ and the only way to describe it is that it’s a ‘colossus’ of a track. Oh, and utterly magnificent. Listen to it below, find them on Facebook, Spotify, Itunes…. And enjoy…
2) Over the Trees
We loved this band as soon as we heard them, with soft atmospheric vocals, and a beautiful mix of guitars, hypnotic drums and rhythms. The 5 piece band from Norway don’t have a huge amount of material online yet to listen to, but check out the great track ‘Garbage Crown’ below. They’ve been getting some good radio airplay back in Norway, have already played some gigs in the U.S., and their appearance at by:Larm should bring them to even more peoples attention (as it has ours…).
3) Palace Winter
Another band on the excellent Tambourhinoceros label that we’ve been meaning to formally write about for a while, Danish / Australian band Palace Winter have been featured in a number of websites and newspapers, played live in the UK, and have been highly recommended to us by those that saw them. They released their debut EP towards the end of last year, and will be following that up with a full album release in 2016. They are likely to be a popular act to see at by:Larm.
4) Aiming for Enrike
As regular readers will know, we love finding bands who pull on influences from across different genres, and produce something utterly unique, and gloriously original – Frisk Frugt, Bror Forsgren and many others. Anyway, Norwegian instrumental (at least from what I’ve heard) duo, Aiming for Enrike somehow manage to fuse electronic, minimalist, punk and jazz into one huge cacophony of noise, which may not be quite for everyones taste, but to us it sounds pretty special. And even better news is that in the last few hours they’ve signed a deal with ‘Name Music’, and an album is on its way.
https://www.facebook.com/aimingforenrike/ https://soundcloud.com/aiming-for-enrike
5) Virgin Suicide
Another band we were going to write about ages ago, Virgin Suicide from Denmark came to our attention last year through the excellent ‘Good Because Danish’ blog (if I remember correctly…), and I spent a fair time listening to their debut album before running out of time to review it. They have such a great 80s / 90s indie pop sound, and the songs are packed full of melodies. Anyway featuring them now is good timing because their single ‘Virgin Suicide’ came out in the UK on Friday and was played on the excellent Lauren Laverne’s show, and you cant get much better than that.