One of the most gratifying things about doing this job is discovering new talent which might otherwise go unreported in the UK.
I became a fan of Norway’s Highasakite after seeing them open for Of Monsters and Men in November 2015. Unfortunately they broke up in 2017, three of the members departing to leave just the original duo.
Those three went their own separate ways, Kristoffer Lo doing his own thing, while Marte Eberson, who also writes and records with her father, the jazz guitarist Jon Eberson, eventually teamed up again with keyboard maestro and composer Øystein Skar in a new band, Löv (which translates as ‘Leaf’ in English). Completing the picture is Martin Halla, a winner of the Norwegian TV equivalent of ‘The Voice’.
Collectively they have an impressive pedigree and have featured in GIITTV before, via the Nordic Music Scene monthly report.
They have recorded four singles, the first three being ‘Superhuman’, ‘Fuel to the Fire’ and ‘All of the Lights’.
Their new single, ‘Take me home’, follows a year spent playing festivals around Norway and pre-dates a debut album this year.
The collective experience these three have is almost guaranteed to produce top notch songs and they haven’t failed with this one, which is right on the button. It might have been written specifically with a Radio 2 playlist in mind. More interesting to me though is the combination of piano and percussion that is reminiscent of Arcade Fire’s ‘Sprawl II (Mountains beyond Mountains).’
As with their previous releases there is little similarity to anything Highasakite produced, either now or previously, apart from occasional vocal interjections by Marte Eberson.
Löv has nailed a generic European pop song formula here in a way I haven’t previously heard from a Norwegian band. And this time the synths that were evident in the previous singles (although the acoustic version of ‘Superhuman’, above, is better, I believe) have been toned down, where Highasakite have been turning them up.
I speculated when I reviewed ‘All of the Lights’ that they could achieve the same heights as Highasakite, which for several years was Norway’s #1 band and might even be considered still to be, and to that I’ll add now that they might even surpass them abroad, including in the UK, if they get the right break.
‘Take me home’ was released on Friday 17 January.
Löv will play the By: Larm festival in Oslo, 27-29 February.
