Never a band to repeat themselves, VOLA have created their most diverse album yet with Witness. Prog catches up with singer Asger Mygind and drummer Adam Janzi to discuss their new sound and why one track even found them searching for “a hip hop vibe”.

Words: Holly Wright  All Images: Nikolai Linares

VOLA: constantly changing direction.

It was, perhaps, inevitable that VOLA would do something unexpected in 2021. When they rose to fame in 2016 it was their disparate mix of heavy-bottomed djent riffs and luscious melodies seemingly inspired by the New Romantic era that caught people’s attention. The Danish-Swedish outfit injected their soulful arrangements with modern progressive heaviness in ways that had not quite been done before and as a result their debut album, Inmazes, offered up something rare, memorable and exceptional. When fans wanted more of the same two years later, they dropped a record that side-stepped the familiar staccato crunch of their debut in favour of soft balladry, pop-electronica and keyboard-heavy passages. Those mechanical djent sounds – perpetuated by the likes of Meshuggah and TesseracT – made a cameo but were no longer VOLA’s bedrock; they were treading a different path with their follow-up, Applause Of A Distant Crowd.

“Sometimes we go to the rock scene as well,” says frontman Asger Mygind about their second album, fully recognising the deviation from their metallic start. Fast-forward to 2021 and VOLA have landed another album that’s taken a detour. Ask them what vibe they’re pursuing these days and they use words like ‘big’ and ‘produced’. The four-piece, who’ve always had a thing for spacious sounds, have reached a new level of ambition.