NEW ALBUMS
MOUNT EERIE
Night Palace PW ELVERUM & SUN
After a tumultuous few years, Phil Elverum looks for peace and solace on genre-mashing latest.
By Daniel Dylan Wray
Recorded “nowhere mostly”:
Elverum in his home studio, 2024
SELF TIMER
8/10
NIGHT PALACE
is a record full of contradictions. It is a vast, sprawling, epic album that spans 26 tracks, but it is also a record that embraces small moments, stripped-back simplicity and domesticity. Lyrically it contains heavy subject matter, both personal and political, but it also sometimes just literally depicts the weather outside. It is specific yet vague. It is raw and noisy, quiet and beautiful, melodic yet discordant. At times it feels angry and confused and at others calm and at peace. It is a record that beautifully and ambitiously embodies the messy world we live in and the deep complexities of human emotions that one goes through during periods of prolonged turbulence. And Phil Elverum has encountered
more turbulence than most in his life. In 2015, just after the birth of their child, Eleverum’s wife Geneviève was diagnosed with inoperable pancreatic cancer and died the following year aged just 35. A short marriage to the actor Michelle Williams followed, after which Elverum describes being left “homeless, scraped raw and crushed”. Throw in a pandemic with a child as a solo parent, trying to build a new home from scratch in a new location, and you have a near decade-long period of disorder. But this sounds like an album of someone crawling out of the other side. “Eventually the flailing of my life calmed some,” Elverum says of the record.