Nordic Spotlight
The best music and music festivals in Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Greenland, and the Faroe Islands
Anyone who knows Icelandic music knows Vök. It’s really that simple. The band has become a staple of Iceland Airwaves‘ yearly lineups (and, of course, they’ll play again this year), and folks in the US including Stereogum, Noisey, and KEXP have sung their praises. This is all for good reason: Vök’s electropop is as propulsive as it […]
Sandra Kolstad is a classically trained pianist (whom we’ve praised before), but you might not immediately know this from her newest song, “Haflife.” Although the track certainly betrays the melodic instincts of a creator with extensive formal schooling, it’s built entirely on modular synths and Kolstad’s beaming, malleable soprano. Her next album, Burning Love, is currently […]
Iceland is a notoriously beautiful country. About one-third of its population lives in its metropolitan capital, Reykjavik; the rest of the country is mostly greenery, mountains, and wildlife as far as the eye can see, with really just one two-lane road connecting it all. Anyone who’s seen it in the sunlight might describe it as […]
Leave it to the Danes to bring weirdness into electronic and pop music. Last month, we freaked out about how Danish trio CHINAH’s “Strange Is Better” subverted much of what we love about these genres to tremendously exciting and hooky effect; this month, Danish duo mono mono seems to be filling that role for us. […]
On Norwegian duo Misty Coast’s Bandcamp page, the band’s bio is just this quote from the always-trustworthy My Old Kentucky Blog: “Dreamy, psychedelic vibes are a necessary requirement of a balanced music diet and Norwegian duo Misty Coast, comprised of Megaphonic Thrift members Linn Frøkedal and Richard Myklebust, are the latest discovery keeping us healthy.” […]
Finnish artist Jaakko Eino Kalevi has been releasing music in some form or another for over a decade now, but full-length albums by him are relatively infrequent occasions. This Friday, he’ll release his newest, Out of Touch, via Weird World, the Domino Records imprint that also released his 2015 self-titled album. “People in the Centre of […]
Alter Ego by BerndsenTomorrow, Icelandic band Berndsen, fronted by magnetic namesake David Berndsen, begins its US tour (dates in the photo below) behind its just-released new album, Alter Ego. The LP is the band’s first in five years, though it’s released a small flurry of new tunes in the last two. “Alter Ego,” the new album’s […]
A double dose of Nordic artists here! Danish five-piece MALMØ has tapped Faroese singer Eivør for shared vocal duties on the song “The Way,” taken from MALMØ’s debut album, We Come from The Stars. MALMØ frontperson and namesake Maria Malmoe teams up with Eivør, known quite well for her work on Game of Thrones (a show that’s about as Nordic as […]
SpaceX by Acres Wild As you might guess from its title, Norwegian band Acres Wild‘s newest song has something to do with Elon Musk. Namely, the track serves as the band’s official application to join Musk’s SpaceX outerspace transportation program. It’s generally safe to assume that a song with such an ironic premise isn’t going […]
Okay, sure: here at Nordic Spotlight, we love to expose the talents of rising, newer Nordic artists. But sometimes, a Nordic artist who has achieved global success time and time again just does something that reminds us why we constantly look for the artists that in years, maybe decades, will be among the whole world’s […]