Wardruna – Kvitravn

Music For Nations

Despite being fronted by ex-Gorgoroth drummer Einar Selvik and having in the past featured Gaahl on vocals, Wardruna are very much not a metal band. Oh sure, metalheads love them, and they did a bunch of stuff with Enslaved, but they are not a metal band. Because they don’t play metal.

But… hold on and hear me out… what could be more metal than eschewing metal entirely? I expect this goes double in Norway.

After the inevitable delay due to Covid, their fifth album Kvitravn (“white raven”) is finally here, so it’s time to return to their magickal world of Norse awesomeness. (Norsomeness?). And it sees them continue their voyage away from trad-style Norwegian folk to something both more unique and somehow bigger. Oh, don’t worry, the bukkehorn, talharpe and what-have-you are still very much present and correct, and the whole thing’s still underpinned and propelled forwards by those deerskin drums.

This is still the Wardruna you’re used to, but it’s a Wardruna that has owned and developed its sound. Dead Can Dance may, now more than ever, be the best reference point; but put it this way, nobody’s going to be getting the two mixed up any time soon. They share a love of cinematic atmospherics, and a sense of seriousness. Which is not to say that they’re no fun; this is stirring, emotional music, ancient traditions still alive and kicking in the modern age, and THAT’s cool as fuck.

Album opener “Synkverv” pretty much sets out the table, with its chanted vocals and a pace that’s part devotional, part martial. Across the album wolves howl, icy winds blow and fires burn. The dual-pronged vocal attack of Selvin and Lindy-Fay Hella seems as much a natural feature as the weather and wildlife, so well-realised is their musical world. And when they can pump out absolute bangers like “Fylgjutal (Speech Of The Fetch)”, it’s hardly surprising they keep getting hit up by video game and TV show producers (including, of course, Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla and Vikings). Starting as ominous “oh shit, this movie’s gonna be great” music, it bursts into action like a team of horsemen breaking camp and riding off to an urgent confrontation with the slower-paced majesty of its closing section.

The album closes with the mighty “Andvervarljod (Song Of The Spirit-Weavers)”, a ten-minute epic dealing with the Norns, the spinners of fate, that explores all corners of Wardruna’s realm, from the pastoral to the warlike.

In an era when TikTok goes wild for sea shanties, Wardruna’s passion for drawing on the past to recontextualise the present and move on into the future seems oddly fitting — while “timeless” would be an accurate, albeit lazy, description of their sound, it is, as are most things, far more complicated than that. There’s a driven-ness, an obstinacy to cling to their singular vision that really doesn’t care if it irks the purists or terrifies the uninitiated. And that’s pretty bitchin’.

So while Wardruna may not be (in fact aren’t) a metal band, they are in fact metal as fuck in pretty much every other category that counts, and I’ll pillage anyone who says different.

-Justin Farrington-