Trollfest have released Trollywood, their tenth album, through Reaper Entertainment, and marked the day with a video for Troll Brigade.
The record is built on a joke the band have stretched into a whole world. Hollywood glamour meets Norwegian troll mythology, the sleeve and the song titles treat the two as the same industry, and the music behind it leans closer to the early records than anything they have done lately. Blunt riffing, drums pushed forward, and the brass and reeds that have been in this band from the start, all of it played straight enough that the comedy lands rather than collapses.
Troll Brigade follows Day Drinking and Claiming the Walk of Fame, the two singles that went out before the release. Twenty three years in, the Oslo band still describe what they do as True Norwegian Balkan Metal, which is both a joke and an accurate label, because the Balkan brass is exactly what separates them from every other folk metal band in Norway. Trollywood is out on CD, on vinyl and digitally.