Doom merchant power-trio Norna have released “For Fear of Coming”, the latest single from their forthcoming self-titled second album, set for release on 30th August, 2024 through Berlin’s Pelagic Records.
Hailing in parts from the icy Swedish northlands and the glacial expanse of the Swiss Alps, named after the three Norse goddesses of fate who wove the very tapestry of fate underneath the mythical World Tree, Norna aren’t messing around. Their debut album, 2021’s “Star is way way is Eye” was saturated filth; uncompromising, unrelenting ugliness. However, their eponymous sophomore offering digs its claws deeper into the dirt. Sharpened, hungry and desperate, born of the moment and yet years in the making; “Norna” liberates an old rage that has been suppressed for far too long.
Despite only forming in 2020, the three pillars of Norna bring decades of heaviness with them. Consisting of Swedish post-hardcore pioneer Tomas Liljedahl (Breach, The Old Wind) and Swiss stalwarts Christophe Macquat and Marc Theurillat (both of instrumental juggernaut Ølten), Norna came together as a perfect storm of abrasive influences, harnessed by friend and producer Magnus Lindberg (Cult of Luna), to create something new, limitless and terrifying.
Sculpted the same way as their debut album, with ideas and hooks hewn from a mass of noise held quite literally in the clouds (Dropbox being the band’s platform of choice), Norna this time entered the process with a vision; a final, horrific form in mind. As such, the eponymous record pushes their boundaries even further beyond the extreme, with even the briefest moments of calm quickly curdled by the band’s use of insidious ambient synthesisers, manipulated samples and even more distortion.
The punishing introduction to “For Fear of Coming” certainly concentrates Norna’s primal vitriol but the occasional syncopated groove, eerie found sounds and the semblance of something approaching a melodic hook amongst the relentless dirge suggest an intriguing evolution to the band’s brutal sound. That this nuance is summarily obliterated by another tidal wave of down-tempo doom places Norna’s latest offering in a dichotic position between nascent creation and outright destruction, in the urgent present; between the beginning and end of all things.
Unlike so many of us, it seems that Norna have come to terms with the ugly truth that you can’t have beauty without the beast, which makes perfect sense because, as broken, discordant and disgusting as ‘Norna’ is, it’s impossible to look away.
Norna on “For Fear of Coming”:
“We fall down in different depths of fear, which in the end is just an illusion of something that doesn’t exist; deceived by what the mind perceives through the eye.”
