Calling the Spirits – Review of WARDRUNA’s Birna

Zur deutschen Version geht es hier.

Band: WARDRUNA
Album: Birna
Genre: Nordic Ritual Folk
Playing time: 66:11
Release: 24.01.2025 (via Sony)

Thanks to Sylvie Atterer/Sailor Entertainment for providing the promo material and sending a vinyl edition of this album!

It’s cold and also very uncomfortable these days. Life seems to be mysteriously at a standstill and yet you can see the traces of nature making its way everywhere. It is into this dichotomy that WARDRUNA release their sixth studio album Birna.

Normally, I would take the time to go into each song on the album individually. In the first draft of this review, I did just that. However, WARDRUNA’s sound is something so transcendental and spherical that it can’t be done that way. What matters to me is the description of the atmosphere of this album.

WARDRUNA create a world of sound that touches the primal in you. Birna, which means “bear”, is an album that doesn’t need to be listened to, but rather perceived in its entirety. The sounds of composer Einar Selvik accompany us through the cyclical life of the bear, which is characterized by the adversities of nature.

While we accompany the bear through her hibernation in Dvaledraumar and Jord til Ljos, the following pieces are the slow awakening from the death-like hibernation of the creature that played and still plays such a central role in Nordic mythologies. Although the bear is a dangerous animal, it is also remembered here musically as a protector and guide.

Birna is the soundtrack to the feelings you experience when you are out and about in the forest at different times of the year. The album has bright, sunny moments as well as profound, melancholy phases. Using modern means and old instruments, WARDRUNA evoke emotions in you that you wouldn’t have thought possible. Hovering over all of this, however, is the dark foreboding of what mankind is doing to the forest, to nature and ultimately to Birna. The longing for the guardian of the forest lays a longing cloak over the sounds.

All in all, Birna is an album as you would expect from WARDRUNA: Einar Selvik and his bandmates succeed in returning to the ancient like no other. Despite the ancient sounds, the album also has a tonal modernity that is unparalleled in the scene. Against the backdrop of global warming and the destruction of the habitat of many living beings, Birna is both a reflection and a song of mourning. WARDRUNA have created an epic that works and works and works!