Eivør

Eivør’s home, the Faroe Islands, is a small island country in the North Atlantic, which was populated by Scandinavians in the Viking Age. Originally incorporated into the Norwegian kingdom in the medieval period, the Faroese have found themselves subject to foreign rule for over 1000 years. Today, the country is a semi-autonomous part of the Danish kingdom, but it has had its own government since 1948. Eivør is strongly inspired by the Faroese natural scenery and traditional culture. It is a land of extremes, full of contrasts, with heavy, dark winters, and bright, joyful summers. Growing up in a small village among the characteristic steep cliffs and grassy hills, Eivør is deeply inspired by the unique Faroese landscape and its vibrant traditional folk music. Despite centuries of foreign rule, the Faroese folk culture has persevered, especially through communal singing and dancing. This cultural resilience in the face of a harsh nature and foreign dominance strongly informs Eivør’s music: “A very strong part of Faroese culture is singing together—anywhere people gather, there will be singing,” Eivør explains. “When you listen to old Faroese traditional music, it’s sung acapella and takes you back to its Renaissance roots. It’s pure, expressive, and untamed.”

Eivør has cultivated her distinct guttural singing technique under inspiration from beatboxing, throat-singing, and heavy metal growling to convey the untamed expressiveness inherent to traditional Faroese music and culture. It is a primal call to return to her roots in natural landscape of her birthplace.

Often considered to be one of the most prolific and unique Nordic artists of her generation, Eivør has released 11 studio albums to date, crossing musical genres and always pushing the bounds of the expected. Awarded with the Nordic Council Music Price in 2021, Eivør’s musical journey continues to fascinate.

As a young teenager, Eivør was immersed in the tight-knit local music scene, playing with 20-something musicians in jazz bands as well as rock bands influenced by Portishead, Radiohead, Massive Attack, Sigur Rós and similar acts.

By 16, Eivør released her debut solo collection of Faroese-sung folk-pop. One year later, she left home to study classical singing in Reykjavík, Iceland—soon winning two Icelandic Music Awards for her sophomore album. She spent the ensuing years living in Copenhagen and building a career playing folk festivals, but by 2010, Eivør was ready for a change. Her daring Larva album eschewed the folksiness of her previous work for experimentation and electronics. “I needed to free myself from boxes,” she said. It was the beginning of a new chapter that continues with her richly atmospheric new album, ENN.

The process of ENN built on Eivør’s recent immersion into production and beat-making, but began with a return to classical music. She and her partner, the classical composer Tróndur Bogason, had decamped to a tiny Faroe Islands mountain village of 50 people, called Tjørnuvík with no agenda but to “write freely” for a possible side project. “Slowly I realized: I shouldn’t think about this as a side project,” Eivør said. “This is where I am at right now creatively.” The first track she worked on there became ENN’s melancholic closer, “Gaia,” which Eivør calls “a love hymn for the Earth” that reminded her of the Renaissance music she loved in her youth. On that trip, Eivør also wrote ENN’s opener, “Ein Klóta,” a song about “watching your world from afar” as it changes. “I felt I was making a concept album, in a sense, about the Earth, about our home, our planet. Then it developed into both nature but also human nature—both the outer and the inner landscape, and the struggles of the heart, the struggles between the Earth and humans.”

In recent years, Eivør has composed extensively for film, television and games (The Last Kingdom, God of War) and the cinematic structures of those scores found their way in alongside the music’s propulsive beats, omnipresent rooting in Faroese folk, and the classical flourishes of her opera training. Some of the songs feel like vistas or panoramas moving unexpectedly. “After writing the first two more spacious tracks, the idea started to grow in my head of almost a space opera,” Eivør said. “I was like, what if this journey starts out in space, and you watch the Earth? And you’re so far away from everything that you ever knew? Where am I going? What is this adventure?” The result was a synthesis of her career to date—her curiosity about beat making and noisy expressiveness, combined with the purity of classical music and cinematic atmospheres—and that sonic biography plays out beautifully on ENN’s second track “Jardartra.” It begins with a lurching beat “almost like a heartbeat,” and Eivør wrote it from the Earth’s point of view, as if “Earth is calling on us in the midst of all our human greed and destruction and beckoning us to find our way back to her blue embrace.”

Most of the lyrics, sung entirely in Faroese, were penned in collaboration with the Faroese poet Marjun Syderbø Kjelnæs. Eivør calls the lyrics to the title track especially “hardcore.” The song is about war— “the wars that are going on in the world especially lately, but that have always been going on,” Eivør says, “and how to find a glimpse of light in this overwhelming darkness.” The guttural penultimate track, “Upp Úr Øskuni,” is a thrilling outlier mixing growling beatboxing with visceral throat singing (it’s certainly Eivør’s most metal moment). She considers “Upp Úr Øskuni” a beacon of female empowerment and solidarity. “I wanted to write about sisterhood and women supporting each other, and these raw female elements which are not pretty and not polite, just raw,”

Eivør says. “I wanted it to be wild and untamed. It’s quite witchy. When I wrote the song, I imagined a coven of witches from the past and the present all supporting each other, chanting to each other across the chasm of time.”

After independently releasing her music for many years, ENN marks Eivør’s debut for the metal label Season of Mist—and though her compositions sit outside of any one genre, she is happy to be embraced by the metal community. She identified a shared pagan sensibility in her television scores like The Last Kingdom. “I never felt I really fit into any box,” said Eivør. “I just have to do it my own way.” Recorded with her touring band in the Faroe Islands—where she now lives again, splitting time between her homeland and Denmark—Eivør called ENN “my most pleasurable and also most painful process. I felt that I was stepping into a place where I hadn’t been before, and that’s always scary because you don’t feel that you touch the ground. But it opens up your creativity and takes you to someplace new. It’s woven together all my experiences for the past 10 years, and it’s grounded me.”