Enigmatic composer, multi-instrumentalist and vocalist MYRKUR (Amalie Bruun) Releases New Album Spine Today via Relapse
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Photo By Gobinder Jhitta
Early Acclaim For Spine:
"a genre-spanning opus... She’s using all of her tools, and the results are sonic glory." Consequence
How Motherhood and Norse Myth Brough Myrkur Back to Black Metal...Despite isolation and AI threats, Amalie Bruun has newfound faith in humanity Revolver (Cover Story)
“‘Mothlike’ blends synthy new wave, chilly nordic folk, and (spoiler alert) – duelling tremolo-picked guitar solos.” Guitar.com
“It's Myrkur in revolution" Decibel
Danish singer and multi-instrumentalist Amalie Bruun, mastermind behind Myrkur, talks about the new album 'Spine.' New Noise Magazine (Cover Story)
“There’s no one else who sounds quite like this, at once abrasive and soothing blending seemingly insoluble elements to birth this strange chimera.” Prog
“The most involving, evocative music to grace our ears in 2023” Kerrang
“A riveting odyssey, skilfully merging contrasting sonic landscapes and reflecting emotional tumult in equal measure… A magnum opus in her ever-evolving catalogue.” 9/10, Metal Hammer
“ethereal and haunting” No Clean Singing
“a soulful vocal performance sung in mastermind Amalie Bruun’s native Danish, providing both a confrontation and a vulnerable moment of introspection in one shape-shifting endeavor.” Heaviest of Art
MYRKUR unfolds the next chapter in her personal mythology of Amalie Bruun, setting a new course for the enigmatic composer, multi-instrumentalist and vocalist. Marked by the birth of her child, and a means of making sense of the storm of emotions in that wake, Spine, out today, charts a new course for Bruun through the most turbulent period of her life to new territories beyond, free from genre constraints, and giving rise to a new range of emotional and sonic contours.
This time around, Myrkur reunited with producer Randall Dunn in Sigur Rós’s Icelandic Sundlaugin studio to negotiate the contrast between the deepest human connection of mother and child, and an increasingly disconnected, alienating world, from pandemic restrictions and isolation to the rise of Artificial Intelligence. But if the claustrophobia of lockdown made an impact on the album, musically it’s Myrkur’s most open yet – Bruun’s pristine clear vocals a hyper-sensitive barometer, finely tuned to states where bliss, anxiety, grief, intimacy and psychic wanderlust co-exist, weaving wide-ranging traces of her musical background into rapt and tantalising new forms.
The most personal of artistic journeys rarely take a predictable path. Over the course of three studio albums, two EPs and a theatrical score under the Myrkur banner, Bruun has been willing to both pick apart genre conventions and delve deep into the heart of them, remapping her Danish folk roots and black metal onto the most dynamic of internal terrain.
Where 2015’s acclaimed debut M and 2017’s nightmare-induced Mareridt albums bolstered black metal with emotional currents that were by turns rapt and harrowing, steeped in tradition but enflamed into coruscating acts of deliverance, 2020’s Folkesange found refuge in the durability and archetypal storytelling of Scandic folk, blending songs ancient and new into a tapestry that bound the individual and the universal, once again reaching into elemental forces to invoke something resonant and unbound. But if there is solace to be found in continuity, Myrkur has often been equally tuned to the forces of upheaval, the ever-shifting nature of Amalie’s music and ongoing dialogue between the two. In art, as in life, there are rubicons to be crossed, new chapters to navigate and sensations to explore, and the act of self-examination that makes sense of it all is, by its nature, also one of reinvention.
Spine is a title with a host of potent connotations: growth, strength, defiance, a core of our being, and flexibility. It’s what holds a human up, and allows us to rebuild. It’s an album that encompasses all these traits - an act of rebirth that balances our most euphoric and our darkest moments.
Spine is available today via Relapse Records on CD, Vinyl, and across all digital retailers worldwide. For more details on variants and deluxe edition pressings, including a baby pink version for the "Ten Bands, One Cause" Breast Cancer Awareness Month campaign, go here.
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