Progressive RockPost-rock
Imaginary Friend Records · 2 October 2026
“Lifting Apples” closes the record in four minutes fifty-six, with Mogwai’s Stuart Braithwaite on guitar. It starts with Erlend Aastad Viken’s voice almost whispered and ends with three or four layers stacked on top — a spiral of electronics, distant strings, one tight melody — without the listener ever catching the moment they were added.
Viken comes out of the Norwegian band Soup, and this is the third and final chapter of a project he opened in 2021. He does nearly all of it himself: writing, voice, guitars, bass, keys, percussion, banjo, string arrangements and the cover. Andreas Kjøl Berg plays drums, though not across the whole album; the vocals are his and Myrtoula Røe’s; the strings are Tuva Halse and Jonas Viken on violin and Astrid Hoffman-Tollaas on cello. It was recorded between January and March 2024 at Imaginary Friend Studios and has taken more than two and a half years to come out.
The strings carry whole tracks. On “Limerence” (5:01) they are practically everything there is, with the piano behind them, and the track stays deliberately still; on “All the Rage” (7:12) they come in under a held-back passage and climb to the centre of the song before dropping away again. “Reveries of Gold” (4:26) is where the banjo shows up, in short accents, and where the lead guitar makes the most straightforwardly rock move on the album.
“Fleeting Glimpse” (7:23) enters on a light jazz tempo and turns into a climb that does not stop until the end; “Sun World” (5:21) hands the record to Myrtoula Røe and lowers the temperature. Paul Savage and Viken mixed it, and Christian Obermayer mastered it at Strype Audio.
“Nothing to Forgive Nothing to Forget” (7:07) and “All the Rage” (7:12) both sit in the first half, and both work by stacking layers; with only “Limerence” between them, the opening twenty-five minutes all move at the same pace. The closing four tracks are the most varied of the set and they arrive once the album has already spent more than half its time.
Imaginary Friend Records, 2 October 2026 on digital. The vinyl follows on 16 October, the same day as “The Further We Go the Deeper It Gets”, the second part of the same project. Eight tracks, 47:06.
Rating: 8.5/10
Text by Guillem Cardós