Band:	Norna
Album:	Norna
Style:	Post-metal
Release date:	August 2024
A review by:	RaduP

01. Samsara
02. For Fear Of Coming
03. Ghost
04. Shine By Its Own Light
05. Shadow Works
06. The Sleep

I've already seen people make the Norna Shore joke, but did you know that both bands are also monumentally heavy, albeit in different genres?

The first time I stumbled upon Norna's name was seeing them on the lineup of 2023's Roadburn. I wasn't familiar with them, and generally for a festival full of clashes like Roadburn, that means I'm probably not gonna see a set of a band I don't know because it's likely that there's another band I do know and wanna see clashing with it. In Norna's case I picked OvO instead, not necessarily the worst of clashes. In hindsight, I did make the right choice, because I later had the opportunity to see Norna again, this time in my own country, at a festival where I also served as a photographer, and this time they were clashing with Tankard, meaning that I got to actually spend some time during Norna's set and shoot them as well.

It was, thus, the quite rare case of me hearing a band's music live before I listened to their recorded music. I was already aware of the genre tags, and post-metal is often a pretty predictable genre once you know exactly which branch the band plays. To be more specific, Norna play atmospheric sludge metal as opposed to really heavy post-rock, so I knew to expect huge trudging riffs, an oppressive atmosphere, and monolithic hardcore-tinged vocals. I got huge trudging riffs, an oppressive atmosphere, and monolithic hardcore-tinged vocals. What I didn't know at the time, was that the band was fronted by Tomas Liljedahl, previously of post-hardcore legends Breach, but most likely to be more familiar to metalheads for his part in Terra Tenebrosa, and being The Ocean's vocalist on Fluxion and Aeolian.

The first time I heard Norna, I was catching up to new releases while I was at the gym, and I don't remember being so bludgeoned and energized by what I was hearing in a way I haven't been in a long time. Part of it is indeed the hardcore part of the sound, and also I have to admit that once the more meditative (yet still anxiety inducing) parts of the first song came in it lost a bit of its immediate first listen impact, but the first few minutes of "Samsara" sounded colossal, and also gnarly and vitriolic. As the band describes it, their debut was ugly, but Norna "digs its claws deeper into the dirt".

Comparisons to stuff like Cult Of Luna are quite fitting, especially considering that the album was produced by Magnus Lindberg, but I am reminded more of caustic stuff like LLNN or Glassing. Though what Norna do here can be boiled down to two ingredients. On one side it's the sheer heaviness of it, mostly attributed to the bass-heavy colossal sound, the repetitive pummeling riffing, the hardcore-tinged vocals, leaving the drums to often be the one element with the most variation, though they also feel especially vicious. On the other side it's a more atmospheric side of the sound, sometimes a bit more mellow, sometimes more harrowing, sometimes more haunting territories. It feels like more than just something to contrast the heavier side of the sound, the two alternating and interplaying quite well in a way that circumvents the usual build-up and release structures, opting to splice up the lighter side with moogs and samples. Norna feel just as vital when they're intensely caustic or when they're subtly unsettling.

Of course Norna could've technically been a heavier album overall if it pulled back less and focused more on its heavier side, but then it wouldn't have proved how heavy one could remain even when pulling back. Plus, it probably would've been an endurance test. At a very lean 40 minutes, it is instead as immersive as such a caustic album could be.