NEWS

The front cover art for Follow Me Home, the ninth album by Oslo, Norway’s I Was A King (Coastal Town Recordings, Oct. 28) displays dotted lines that correspond to colorful cutouts on the back cover, one for each of the album’s twelve songs.

This is an innocent, childlike prompt to play it like a puzzle, literally, but on a more figurative note, this bit of fun also feels like a suggestion to fill in the blanks on what these songs mean to the listener.

“We recorded Follow Me Home in December of 2021 in a building that had been a very important hub for Norwegian music over the last 20 years,” Frode Strømstad, one-half of the duo with Anne Lise Frø, explains. “While we were making the album, the building was emptied, and the heat and water shut off. It has since been demolished.”

Even under these considerably less-than-ideal circumstances, Strømstad and Frøkedal managed to make another reality of the time – producing these recordings during a lockdown – work to their advantage. The minimal take on the sound that I Was A King had been traveling towards all this time is its strongest asset on Follow Me Home.

“The previous two records were very band-oriented,” Strømstad says. “We felt that doing it as a two-piece this time would be a fresh approach, playing instruments we normally don’t play just to get some different ideas and textures and keeping it as simple and organic as possible.”