The Norwegian singer-songwriter Juni Habel writes hypnotic hymns. Like floes under a cobalt-blue twilight sky, these prayer-like tracks remain buoyed up by an acoustic-led guitar: each fingerpicked strumming pattern conjures a spell over and under us; each melodic ascent like snow billowing; each ghostly instrumental passage like a muffled confession. These quiet and mysterious songs are rooted in a longing to escape into and out of time; they’re reveries that emanate a spiritual stillness.
At the heart of Habel’s sensibility is a delicacy—an existential awareness of life’s fragility—rendered through an understated tone—a Nordic aesthetic in which little, if anything, happens. Or, conversely, everything happens within. Like the Norwegian writer Tarjei Vesaas, Habel presents the perilous beauty of nature as both a metaphor and a fact, to enlarge and to reduce emotions, to press impermanence against permanence, to inhabit a liminal space wherein poetry resides.
After releasing All Ears (2020) and Carvings (2023), Habel returns with Evergreen in Your Mind, a fey and quiet album with unending depths, and, undoubtedly, it is her best work to date. The LP is not a departure but rather a continuation, which is to say ghostly folk and spellbinding ballads, complete with frost-bitten melodies hung in abeyance.
The effectiveness of Evergreen in Your Mind lies in its cohesiveness. Thus, to highlight a song misses its point—if it even has a point, as this album is above intellectualism. The record is about experiencing: to listen, to feel, to be. Indeed, it is more akin to grasping time and then opening your fist to find petals, only for them to blow away on the wind as if nothing had been pressed against your palm in the first place. Mirroring an Impressionist painting, the subject is secondary to atmosphere—an atmosphere created by an acoustic guitar and Habel’s unadorned voice—not to mention electric guitar, piano, organ, violin, synth, saw, and electronic effects, all deployed with sophistication and subtlety.
The opener, “Another High”, immediately draws you in with its circular guitar strumming pattern, and, with some bright chord changes in the chorus (with an abundance of string squeaks), Habel unlocks a door to another world. Lyrically, it reveals what is on the narrator’s mind: transcendence. “He knows just what I want in another life,” Habel intones, without quite letting on the gravitas of the situation.
In the sprightly-strummed “I’d Like to See It”, Habel accentuates the word “fate”, as if in that instant her fate, previously unbeknownst to her, is revealed. Yet it is just another passing thought; profundity comes and goes on this record without lingering or second-guessing.
The looping instrumental “Pearl Cloud Song” exemplifies that Juni Habel neither needs words nor a bare-bones approach to her compositions to be impactful—in fact, it is infused with an acoustic guitar and bass drum, as well as a lachrymose pedal steel; indeed, it is one of her most hypnotic pieces to date. Conversely, “Tessa” could be a prayer. “Lord, I don’t mind,” Habel implores. Also, with her Nordic diction, Habel elongates “waaater”, complete with an electric piano concluding the simple but moving refrain.
What Habel has achieved with this album is to show, through silence and space, that less is more. The record is the equivalent of a rugged mountain, with glacial melodies and a voice like ice; it reflects what you want to see. Moreover, Habel expresses universal themes—love, the passage of time, memory—through fragmented and elliptical imagery, which, rather than obscuring or buffering its impact, makes them all the more effective.
The melancholic “I Lay My Trust” finds Juni Habel strumming with such pathos and precision, as if to keep her from entirely yielding to inertia. That said, the narrator places her trust in their defeat; in other words, we are stronger because of our mistakes. The melodic “Stand So Still” is infused with mellifluous humming in the chorus, while the instrumental “Gitarhum”, buttressed by a looping bass, has touches of freak folk—think Vashti Bunyan. The sparse and bleak-sounding “Colours Close to Me”, led by a nylon-stringed guitar, echoes Leonard Cohen-esque flamenco fingerpicking on his album Songs of Love and Hate (1971).
What Habel does best is help us see the world with new eyes, as if the trials and tribulations of existence can, if not undone, be assuaged by nature. Also, she is in conversation with the departed, as if she were singing with them in mind, or as if they were singing through her. To achieve this, she straddles reality and reveries, where, in this indeterminate realm, loss signifies remembering, potentially saving us from oblivion, or at least reminding us of the ephemeral plight we face.
For instance, in the spooky “Statues”, the last track on the record, Habel sings of abandoned statues lost at sea, as if we’re the statues, stuck in a murky sea indefinitely. “Memories are forever,” Habel sings as her last words on the album, which she offers to the listener like a comforting hand—or not. Like an existentialist, Habel does not provide answers or glib conclusions; her work has a compelling ambiguity.
Undoubtedly, Juni Habel is one of the most arresting contemporary folk musicians, and Evergreen in Your Mind is a significant leap forward in confirming the fact—and more. Importantly, to listen to the album is to feel time stand still, so much so that you wonder if the singer, then you, even exists? Yes, there is a weightlessness to the record; you might as well be floating. It is as if Habel has brought us up to the clouds or brought the clouds down to us.