Sixty-eight minutes and fifty seconds, eight tracks, an opener of 13:56 and a closer of 11:16. Kinship is built to the proportions of a song cycle, the Romantic form in which a single voice walks through a sequence of songs while the accompaniment walks beside it, comments on it and now and then overtakes it, and for the greater part of its length the Danish and Faroese quintet carries that architecture without letting a phrase sag. Released by Metal Blade on 25 October 2024, three years and eight months after Access All Worlds sent the band's story out among the stars, mixed and mastered by Jacob Hansen at Hansen Studios in Ribe and played by the same five musicians, the second full-length from Iotunn drags that story back to a prehistoric tribe and to one tribesman inside it. The scale shrank. The ambition did not.
The Faroese singer who also fronts Hamferð and Barren Earth, Jón Aldará, is the protagonist of this cycle in every sense, and he sings it with four instruments in one throat: a hushed, nearly spoken clean voice, a full operatic belt, a death growl and a black metal scream. The opening of "Kinship Elegiac" gives you the first of them over plucked guitars, patient as a Lieder singer waiting for the pianist to finish the introduction, and then, halfway through those fourteen minutes, the growls and screams arrive and tear the plucked figure to shreds, the drums of Bjørn Wind Andersen seizing the pulse while the brothers Jesper and Jens Nicolai Gräs throw solo after solo into the gap. An overture announces everything the work will do. This one does exactly that, at length, and earns the length.
The lead single, "I Feel the Night", states the record's method in six minutes and thirty-nine seconds: a mellow verse, then a chorus where the guitars come down in full and Aldará climbs over them to the top of his chest voice. It is a ballad scored for a metal band rather than a metal song slowed down into a ballad, and that distinction is the whole art of it. The verse is written for chamber forces; the chorus lands like a full orchestra entering fortissimo on the downbeat, every desk at once, and the voice never has to strain to be heard above it. Around him the brothers fill every bar with tremolo figures and open chords, and their leads are bright enough to answer the singer phrase for phrase instead of merely decorating him. Counterpoint, in other words. Not figuration.
If you want one track to judge the record by, take "Earth to Sky". The seventh song opens in black metal fury and screams, then turns into an exchange of clean and harsh lines, a chorus with a genuine hook and a long lead section that the guitars seize like a soloist grabbing the cadenza the composer left blank and refusing to hand it back. Six minutes and forty-three seconds. Not one of them is spent waiting. Before it, the busier and more aggressive "The Coming End" keeps the harsh side of the band in the foreground and hands the guitars one of the record's finest solos, and "Twilight" earlier on rides a blackened edge with a melody big enough to survive it.
Then the amplifiers go quiet. "Iridescent Way" is entirely acoustic, classical guitars and that voice and very little else, five minutes and thirty-nine seconds that the brothers, who both came up on the classical instrument, had wanted on an Iotunn record for years. On paper it is the track most likely to be skipped. In practice it is the slow movement of the cycle, the one song where the accompaniment steps back far enough for the protagonist to stand alone, and placed straight after the clatter of "The Coming End" its hush lands with more force than any blast beat on the record. Kinship credits a single singer, which on a record of this size counts as an act of discipline; one throat does the work that a loft of forty would do elsewhere.
"When we sat with the final master of Kinship, we had the feeling of reaching the final peak," Jesper Gräs told New Noise in an interview published on 25 October 2024, the day of release. He meant the end of the work. On any honest reading, the end of the record is the movement that takes longest to begin. "The Anguished Ethereal" runs 11:16, starts calm and stays calm far too long, and only in its second half becomes the heaviest and most blackened writing on the album, before it lets everything drain away into a quiet ending. A coda that spends half its length tuning up is still a coda that spends half its length tuning up, however fine the playing once the bows finally touch the strings. The mix carries a smaller fault of the same family: Hansen's sound is full and natural, but the harsh voice sits behind the clean one, and when the arrangement thickens the growls lose their attack. The record shows the cost plainly. Fifty-seven minutes of this cycle are as complete as progressive death metal gets; the last eleven arrive late to their own climax.
Fifty-seven minutes of this cycle are as complete as progressive death metal gets; the last eleven arrive late to their own climax.
What remains, beyond dispute, is the most complete vocal performance the style has produced in some time, set inside a band that writes for it as a composer writes for a soloist: with room to breathe, with lines that answer back, with a cadenza in every movement. If progressive death metal for you means riffs first and singing as an afterthought, Kinship will reorder your priorities within its first fourteen minutes. No record of 2024 argues more finely that a single voice, properly accompanied, can carry an hour of extreme music on its own. Start it at the beginning, give the closer its patience, and the cycle repays every bar.