IOTUNN (Photo by Nikolaj Bransholm)
Kinship is a massive album arising from the primeval sea. A mythological music journey of eight songs which span across immense spheres musically and lyrically exploring the deep roots of the human nature, its connection and disconnection with everything and everyone, and how our choices have always defined ourselves and the lives lived. Eight songs which show IOTUNN expand their musical worlds to new territory without ever losing grip of the trueness of their core sound. A hard and extensive creation.
The album explores themes of conformity versus following your own path and the consequences your choices have for relationships. It is also a consideration of the mind-body connection; especially with regards to how you interact with the physical world i.e. nature, and how it, in turn, influences your identity, your choices, your individuality.
Set in primeval time the album unfolds the story of a tribesman who is part of a prehistoric tribe. It tells the story of life’s manyfold conditions as themes of unity/disunity, light/dark, body/mind, nature/culture, good/evil, creation/destruction and human/inhuman are unfolded throughout the album.
“Everything is related, and everything has an impact, and we all must find our ways to our true selves and true freedoms in our choices in this interconnectedness of everything. The album explores themes of conformity versus following your own path and the consequences your choices have for relationships. It is also a consideration of the mind-body connection; especially with regards to how you interact within yourself, how you are influenced and controlled by the arenas of life and the interaction with nature. All this influences your identity, your choices, and your individuality“, Jón Aldará explains.
Jón and Jesper will now lead you through the Kinship album track by track.
Kinship Elegiac
Jesper: This is the most extensive song we´ve ever done, and we wrote it over the span of years. Quite soon in the beginning of the writing process this song kind of told us that it should open the album, and so it does. This song encompasses every aspect of the album both musically and lyrically in many ways. It is the big beginning of the story of a tribesman who´s journey we follow throughout the album, and you could say of the human history as such. Throughout the song the listener is led through various wonders with many different layers and moods.
Jón: In the opener a tribesman senses something strange is happening in his community, as his previously rebellious and fiercely independent older brother has suddenly been stricken with dementia and left unable to communicate. Feeling alienated and hopeless, he decides to follow the ominous signs and escape the village to trace his own path in life.
“I’ve known you so long
I know that you never belonged
I’ve watched you never change
All alone with the same sad song
You’ve seen the coming end
In any case seen through it all
I was blind to what you saw
Caught in my last failing cry
Lost in the night’s howling wind
And crashing shadows, you left me
Pushed by the forces of your own abandonment
You left me, you left me”
Mistland
Jesper: Mistland is perhaps the most important song for me personally in the IOTUNN catalogue so far. Creatively it evolves from an idea of a song which I´ve had in my mind for years, and with Mistland it finally became. After laying the foundation of the song, it took off with Jens Nicolai and I working on it intensively for lots of time, and then with the whole band contributing to a truly inspirational circular creative matter. Mistland is very personal to me because its sonic expressions reflect deep, and sincere feelings derived from being alive which is how we like to express our music. I find a melancholy that I see as part of all the experiences and feelings you can have throughout life. It is a melancholy which always gives deeper and higher perspectives to whatever state of mind you are in. A true fellowship which can set you free or entangle you into something where you lose yourself”
Jón: This great feeling of melancholy which can derive from so many things and events is something that is at stake in the inner life of the tribesman and in all of us. Out from the mist of the woods surrounding his homestead, the tribesman journeys far out beyond where he has ever been before, all the while hearing his family searching for him among the trees and seeing the light from their torches through the fog as he flees deeper and deeper into the wilderness.
“From the woods they call my name
In the mist we are all the same
When the sky reflects their flames
I will be calling out for rain”
Twilight
Jón: In the third song the tribesman sees the larger world and its diverse wonders and horrors. He feels free and invigorated, and as his adventure turns into his life’s dream, he recalls his childhood listening to his brother’s stories, which he never understood until now. Stories of finding knowledge and wisdom in the great beyond far away from the world of his tribe.
Jesper: This song sets of into high energy, and reflects the acceleration of freedom which Jón describes. The feeling of the world opening and the thrill of everything. This is set in that spark of Twilight where the dark is the deepest and the light the brightest. Musically this is expressed through many ways with energy and a lot of epic moments. From the big marking intro to the more spoken word avant-garde-ish intro to the mixture of thrash and black in the verses to the call out epicness in the choruses that repetive and yet evolving outro.
“Twilight
Hope flies free
A life for a dream”
I Feel the Night
Jón: As the tribesman finds solace and joy in exploring the great wilderness, he has vivid and delirious dreams of his kin catching up with him, being reunited with his family in both joyous and dark circumstances. He sees and feels the darkness as it closes in on him. The loss of belonging creates conflicting feelings within him as he searches further and further into the wonders of the natural world.
Jesper: “‘I Feel The Night’ is the result of many years searching for a certain kind of song. The conflicting feelings of this songs is expressed by the huge amount of musical dynamics. This is a song that we´ve wished to do for a long time build on the inspiration from big lyrical and musical storylines of songs such as ‘Stairway To Heaven,’ ‘Child In Time,’ and ‘Fade To Black’ – to mention a few – which have been at the core of inspiration for IOTUNN. We searched to make our song full of dynamics, feelings, and huge storytelling. This is ‘I Feel The Night.’ Lots of atmosphere and lots of heaviness.
“I feel the night touch my heart
A torrid river sweeps this shadowed art
Burns through a gate at which appears my maker
So cold the light, my father’s eyеs”
The Coming End
Jesper: This song was the very first from the Kinship album that we worked on together with Jón. We worked on the verse, bridge and chorus sections when Jens Nicolai and I visited Jón in his home country The Faroe Island for the first time. I really love this song. It is to the point and still proggy, and the midsection of the song unfolds itself like a metal symphony. Also, I find the chorus to be such a special atmosphere.
Jón: In this song the tribesman discovers that the tribe is on his heels, and he calls to the elements, to the wilderness, for an answer: where do I belong? After an intense chase and a fight, he finally decides to surrender and go back to his tribe.
“No absolution in the mud and rain
A wilderness of mind changing all the time
Sure, one reaps as one does sow
And I can only hope for bettеr yield
When it is I who is given to thе earth
Bitter failings this far into the game
Lost to embattled souls screaming for light
Let them have us
Let them reign”
Iridescent Way
Jesper: It has been our wish for years to make an acoustic song. Jens Nicolai and I have origins in playing classical guitar and this, combined with the folk tradition in the North as well as in the West as such, has been a huge gift and inspiration throughout the years. The intro and outro part came to me in a dream, and I woke up and played it. This is the only time in my life I´ve managed to do this though I have composed music in dreams before. It laid a foundation for this song which is very special to the whole band, and we hold it very dearly.
Jón: In this calm sphere on the album a lot is at stake. Overcome by a feeling of loneliness and despair, the tribesman finds himself half dreading, half wishing for the tribe to find him. Getting to terms with his fate, the tribesman ponders about the motives of his kin. Why can’t they let him go? And why is he in conflict within himself?
“To watch the rivers roar
To feel the gale winds burn
I quiver like the blade”
Earth To Sky
Jón: In Earth to Sky we are under dark and brooding skies, where the tribe prepares for a ritual. The tribesman shudders upon seeing his kin so coldly and religiously arrange his demise; entirely convinced of their virtue. He is put through a harrowing ordeal, slowly pulling his consciousness out from his body, out from the physical realm, and into incomprehensible spaces.
Jesper: This song has become one of my favorite songs! It unfolds a fundamental piece throughout with a fierce energy. It is progressive and yet simple at its core and presents a sound full of themes, moods, and feelings which truly unfold in the mid-sections but are constantly present throughout. When we were done with the album, we all got hit by this one in a very special way which we had not foreseen. It holds many things which we hold dearly, includes many of the core ingredients which is IOTUNN, and it has some of the most brutal metal of the album.
“Scrеams that benight me
Spilling forth from my core
A vortex stark, obscene
Lies, I cling to fading lies
Let the riptide have it all
The scion of the stars
Fractured
Disjointed and distended lines
Well disguised
Crudely ruptured
Irrеversibly upended
Earth to sky”
The Anguished Ethereal
Jesper: This song is a creative big bang. Its core matters are aligned in the same point which expands itself in different varieties throughout the song. The guitar composition is Jens Nicolai all the way, and to us this song feels like a postlude to the entire album. It is dark and gloomy, but in a crystal-clear way, and it feels like falling into a new dimension.
Jón: In the album closer the tribesman finds himself unconnected to the physical realm but conscious nonetheless and still able to observe the physical realm yet not interact with it. He senses other beings, communicative thoughts, but at the same time seems completely alone. With an apparent ability to both hear and unhear, see and unsee, there is control; but only of himself. Movement is unlimited, and soon he drifts, glides, glitches through an eternal space inhabited sparsely by the visible. Emotions are distant and unspecific. But at the core of his being is a steady and unaltered stream of loss, longing and loneliness. With access to every corner of existence, any sliver of hope still left in him will be channeled towards finding what was lost.
“Multitudes dying
Strange memories
A solar swarm ascends to form new creeds
Behind the ether and selfish grief
Outside categorical belief
No one is me”
