Band:	Sólstafir
Album:	Hin Helga Kvöl
Style:	Post-rock
Release date:	November 08, 2024
A review by:	RaduP

01. Hún Andar
02. Hin Helga Kvöl
03. Blakkrakki
04. Sálumessa
05. Vor Ás
06. Freygátan
07. Grýla
08. Nú Mun Ljósið Deyja
09. Kuml (Forspil, Sálmur, Kveðja)

What do you do when your past couple of releases have been pretty middling affairs? You remember that you used to be a black metal band once.

I am very biased in this. Sólstafir are, or at least used to be, one of my favorite bands. Like a lot of other people I saw the "Fjara" video and somehow unlocked a new way that music can transmit emotions. Albums like Masterpiece Of Bitterness, Köld, and to some extent even the double Svartir Sandar became the kind of albums where I know most of them by heart and I feel immediate familiarity. By Ótta they settled into a very long-form atmospheric sound focused on patient buildups and emotional resonance that felt uniquely Icelanic, but also uniquely Sólstafir-ish. Even if Ótta also became very close to my heart, in retrospect it also felt a bit more streamlined into this atmospheric rock sound that felt like it still had more edges on the previous albums. When a very messy lineup change lead me to have a very hard time separating the art from the artist, some part of that emotional resonance that made their music so impactful was severed.

That said, it is extremely ironic that I've since seen Sólstafir four different times (or was it five?) and all of them since the lineup change. And I've enjoyed every single one. I listened to both Berdreyminn and Endless Twilight Of Codependent Love upon release, and none of it made me not want to just move on with my life. I expected to have the same reaction with Hin Helga Kvöl, but I found myself more engaged than I thought I would be, and I figured I am removed enough from the messier stuff that stained the band for me to properly appreciate their new music for what it is. So I re-listened to their previous two, and found that while individual songs could be pretty good, and also they did introduce new elements to add variety to the each song, too much of it tried to replicate what worked with Ótta, leading to the albums feeling long and meandering. And don't get me wrong, Sólstafir have always had long albums, most of them longer than either of those two, but I never felt the need to just be done with them. I even got to see the entirety of Svartir Sandar performed live at Roadburn, their longest, and it felt shorter than the nearly 20 minutes shorter Berdreyminn.

Hin Helga Kvöl is then a pretty welcome change of pace by being Sólstafir's shortest album, aside from the EPs and demos. Sitting at around 48 minutes is still longer than a lot of albums, but it's also an album where none of the songs go over 10 minutes, and only two songs go over 6 minutes. This makes Hin Helga Kvöl a pretty good foil to how Sólstafir overindulgence in and overreliance on elongated buildups made the previous two albums feel the way they did. Using those techniques in a more restricted manner gives Sólstafir a sense of urgency that they haven't had in a long time, while still letting them linger in the more atmospheric mellowness in the lane they carved for themselves.

Black metal elements have reared their head occasionally in the band's music since being abandoned after their first two records. The band even re-recorded "Til Valhallar" from their 1996 EP for the deluxe edition of Ótta, something which I hoped would be indicative of further reintroduction of harsher elements, but it seems like that only materialized now, nearly a decade later. Perhaps it is singer Aðalbjörn's dabbling in side projects since 2020's Endless Twilight Of Codependent Love that actually ignited the spark, especially the crust punk Bastarður. Don't expect that black metal is part of every song, more like two or three at most, but the title track is the closest to a full on black metal rager than the band has written in two decades, and I'd argue also their best song in a decade. The other songs with a black metal presence, albeit to varying degrees, like "Nú mun ljósið deyja" and "Vor Ás", also serve as album highlights.

But then that's also the crux of the album. It definitely shook things up from the formula enough to get me to care about a new Sólstafir record again, and it also offered a lot of their best material. But as a whole, Hin Helga Kvöl is quite a headscratcher. "Blakkrakki" is too poppy for its own good, "Grýla" has the most intolerable of Aðalbjörn's vocals and also manages to feel meandering in just five minutes, and "Sálumessa" justifies its runtime worse that the much cooler operatics and saxophone-driven doom dirge of "Kuml". And without going full on track-by-track, I feel like even as their shortest album, Hin Helga Kvöl has some tracks I would remove, and others I would like to see rearranged. Even if Hin Helga Kvöl showed that the degradation in quality for Sólstafir is not just the formula they stuck to, it also shows that they're still capable of producing some songs I actually feel compelled to return to.

Now that I've spent time with Berdreyminn, Endless Twilight Of Codependent Love, and Hin Helga Kvöl, I'd still rather not return to any of them for a full listen. But Hin Helga Kvöl has higher highs and lower lows, and even its misses have the courtesy to not waste too much time.