Lumsk have released Haust pa Torget, the second song from Einsemda, and the album behind it is built on somebody else's words: selected poems by Tor Jonsson, the Norwegian writer who was born in 1916 and dead by 1951. It comes out on 30 October through Karisma Records.
Setting a national poet to metal is the sort of thing that goes badly when a band treats the text as decoration, and Lumsk have never done that. They have spent a quarter of a century putting old Norwegian material into a form that keeps its shape, and Jonsson, whose subject was loneliness and the cruelty of small places, is a closer fit than most.
The record follows Fremmede Toner, the album that brought the Trondheim collective back after years away. The seven of them keep working the same seam of progressive metal, folk rock and storytelling, and the new song is darker and more atmospheric than the return record was.