Nordic Spotlight
The best music and music festivals in Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Greenland, and the Faroe Islands
There’s no doubt about it: the ‘80s are back in. You can buy Stranger Things graphic tees at Wal-Mart. Magnum P.I. and Lethal Weapon reboots air weekly on network television. Seemingly every band in sight is dropping its guitars and putting batteries back into its vintage Yamahas. While it might feel like the ‘80s pop […]
Most of what we post about here at Nordic Spotlight is music by Nordic artists who sing in English. Not Alibiet. The Bergen-based band’s music is almost entirely sung in Norwegian; to not compromise on singing in one’s native language is pretty damn respectable. It helps that frontperson Maylen Rusti sounds great no matter what […]
Teamwork makes the dream work, and here at Nordic Spotlight, we love a good Nordic team. The producer NEIKED and the singer and songwriter Miriam Bryant, both from Sweden (where the latter is a massive pop star), have teamed up for “How Did I Find You,” released just about a month ago. Not long after, […]
No, Trentemøller‘s cover of Neil Young’s “Transformer Man” isn’t his first cover (not at all—he put out a full album of covers, Harbour Boat Trips 01 – Copenhagen, in 2009), but it sure is an interesting choice of Neil Young song to cover. Most folks know Young as the guy behind freewheeling rock hits ranging from […]
Norwegian six-piece SKAAR makes music that’s appropriately layered for a group with two more people than in the standard rock band arrangement. SKAAR members include vocalist Karla Lesley Jaeger, who contributes solely her voice; Thor Saunes-Skarsgaard, who handles both bass and synth; and two guitarists whose only role is to play guitars. That’s right: SKAAR seems […]
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 […]
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 […]