Juni Habel has paid us a visit just once before, way back in November 2022, when we identified a similarity with her compatriot Siv Jakobsen, musically, lyrically, vocally and stylistically, and including her penchant for lyrics that are on the dark side at times.
Yet at the same time Juni’s work can be quite soporific, lulling you into a false sense of security.
She’s big on nature, kinship and belonging, having based herself in an isolated converted school house in southern Norway with her grandmother to record her last album in what might, in other circumstances, be the plot from Psycho.
There’s plenty of bracing nature in Norway right now – that part of the world gets similar weather to us, just a little later, has probably been brass and bitter recently like here and like us they’re probably girding their loins in advance of Storm Goretti moving in across the North Sea.
‘Evergreen in your Mind’, her new and third album, exists, Quantum Physics-like, in two worlds at the same time. Songs were recorded in quiet corners of her home, also on the piano in the school where she works, and it uses the physical world around her to provide percussion.
It also takes place, as she herself attests, within a dream; an imagined place in which her desire for oneness with each other and the world around us is finally realised.
It’s a chronicle of her search for connection, a recurring theme across the album; the polarity between stillness and passion, also our resistance to these desires, and the things we want to live and experience.
If that all sounds a little highfalutin’ a quick listen to this title track, which is also the first single, will put you at your ease.
Here, specifically, she is caught between two stools – the ‘pull’ of modernity and the ‘push’ of the natural world and traditional ways of living. She’s hiding from real life and at the same time dreaming about her own personal nirvana.
And there is no false sense of security this time.
Incidentally, I see she is releasing the album here in the UK again (in April) on the Basin Rock label, which is to the best of my knowledge the one closest to me geographically. (The Nordic label is Koke Plate).
Find her on:
Bandcamp (link to track): https://junihabel.bandcamp.com/album/evergreen-in-your-mind
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/junihabel
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/junihabel/
