When Wardruna first announced their fifth album, Kvitravn, readers could have been forgiven for wondering if the Norse spiritualists were signalling a love of prog’s deepest cuts. Released seemingly aeons ago in a cusp-of-pandemic February last year – three and half months before Kvitravn was originally slated for release – the video for the track Grá, complete with wolf prowling around frontman Einar Selvik, triggered a sense of familiarity for anyone with an abiding love of krautrock. The song itself was built on a heartbeat-ratcheting, tribal groove, beaten out on hide drum and bones. It was arrestingly stark yet reached a point of rapt intensity as Lindy Fay Hella’s unfettered, ululating chant ignited around Selvik’s sonorous incantation, but the song’s rolling, traction pull matched, with remarkable precision, Can’s tom-tom-driven Smoke (E.F.S. Nr. 59) from 1976’s Flow Motion.
“This album explores in much more detail certain concepts around humans and how we view ourselves; how we view our surroundings, and our place within it.”