Herzog release Mugwort on 26 October through Amor Fati Productions. It is their second album and their last, and it documents the final year of Asgeir Amort's life.
Work started in 2024, with plans and new ideas and nothing to suggest an ending. In 2025 a persistent pain turned out to be an aggressive kidney cancer that had already damaged one of his vertebrae. Several operations were meant to keep him walking. He was paralysed from the chest down.
Finishing the record became one of the things he wanted to do with the time left. What is on it is not only despair: the band describe it as moving through shock, pain, loss and resilience towards acceptance and presence, and they describe him as joyful, witty and full of life, which is the detail that stays with you.
His voice is on the first part of the album. The cancer reached his diaphragm and he could not go on, so his wife Isa Myling took his words and carried them through the second half, which makes the record a continuation and a goodbye in the same six tracks. Trauma, the third of them, is out now as the first preview. The others are Region of the Nest, Dawn of the Prosper, Chaosphonia, Saudade and Post-Truth.
Herzog formed in Brussels in 2021 and released Furnace in 2023. Deha plays bass. Mugwort comes out on CD and vinyl.