Kaelan Mikla – Magic and Esoterica Amid the Ice of the North
We trace the Icelandic trio's artistic evolution, from early experiments steeped in Nordic folklore, witchcraft and glacial melancholy, to top billing at major European festivals — one of contemporary post-punk's most evocative bands.
Three girls with unpronounceable names: Laufey Soffía (vocals), Margrét Rósa Dóru-Harrýsdóttir (bass), Sólveig Matthildur Kristjánsdóttir (drums, synth). In 2013 in Reykjavík, while still at school, they put together a one-off project to take part in a poetry contest (which they went on to win) organized by the city library. It would turn out to be the first step towards forming a band, whose name was borrowed from the “Lady of the Cold” (“Kælan Mikla” in Icelandic), one of the characters in the series of books devoted to the Moomins, the hippo-like fictional creatures created by Finnish writer Tove Jansson.
From the outset, the music put forward by the trio combines synthetic soundscapes, pulsing bass, deeply poetic lyrics in their mother tongue, and a visual aesthetic steeped in Nordic folklore, witchcraft and glacial melancholy. It's post-punk soaked in darkwave, and on their debut release, the self-produced Mánadans — initially put out in 2014 only on cassette and later reissued by Artoffact Records — it's guided by an intense, minimal DIY approach: Sólveig is still on drums rather than synths, accompanied by Margrét's distorted bass and Laufey's dramatic voice, which stands out for the ease with which she slips into no wave vocal rawness.
The shift from their interesting but still unpolished debut becomes clear once Sólveig moves from drums to synths (analog ones, the Korg in particular): it's the device that makes their overall sound far more commanding, wrapped in darkwave spirals that closely recall the Cure of the “Seventeen Seconds”/“Faith”/“Pornography” trilogy. The result is set down in 2016 on their self-titled second album, Kælan Mikla, released by the Greek label Fabrika Records, marking a deep shift towards darker, profoundly gothic sounds, and catching the attention of the independent press well beyond Iceland's borders. Robert Smith is among their admirers, so much so that he invited the trio to play in London at the 2018 Meltdown Festival, which he curated, placing them alongside pillars of international alternative rock.
In 2018, Nótt eftir nóttconsolidates Kælan Mikla's style: the songs blend dense electronic textures with atmospheres that evoke legends, witchcraft and the darkness of Iceland's long winters. Militant feminists, they express their sense of freedom by presenting themselves as witches from some undefined ancestral era, drawing on local folklore and Nordic mythology, on untouched nature and esotericism. Singing in Icelandic gives the music a mysterious, ritualistic, almost magical phonetic quality, especially for non-local listeners. It's a sound that translates the Icelandic landscape into music: icy, frightening, primal. The sounds, less minimal than on their debut, draw clearly on Eighties darkwave, at times edging towards a dark, esoteric dancefloor. This is the Icelandic band's international breakthrough.
With the release of Undir köldum norðurljósum, in 2021, Kælan Mikla further expand their sonic palette, smoothing out the rough edges to make the overall sound less abrasive. Their music still inhabits the heart of a magical Iceland, with pagan-folkloric references that set them apart from the more earthbound, incendiary approach of Northern European black metal bands. Amid beguiling dances, litanies steeped in deep Nordic atmosphere, witches summoning the spirits of winter, and musical depictions of wind-battered, ice-buried landscapes, the production tends to foreground the icy advance of the synths, with the bass emerging in the many passages closer to a more conventionally post-punk approach, without shying away from the occasional more poetic, delicate moment.
In 2023 a collaboration was born with fellow Icelandic composer Barði Jóhannsson. The occasion was scoring a 1921 Swedish cult movie, The Phantom Carriage, screened at the Transylvania International Film Festival inside a packed church, accompanied by a live performance of the soundtrack composed for the occasion and released a year later. Together, Jóhannsson and Kælan Mikla (who show a growing interest in avant-garde performance) forge a personal artistic language that inhabits a world of folklore, fairy tales, magic and mysticism.
One of the key tracks in Kælan Mikla's catalogue is “Kalt”, from the self-titled 2016 album, whose title translates to “cold” in English. The track opens with a wall of synths, straight-ahead drums and distorted bass, before exploding into the anguish conveyed by singer Laufey Soffía's desperate screams. It's the sound of Icelandic mental and geographic isolation taken to its extreme, where post-punk sheds the urban connotation found in almost every British or Irish band to become something intimately bound up with the island's wild nature. Equally striking is the dreamlike “Hvìtir Sandar”, a collaboration with Alcest featured on “Undir köldum norðurljósum”, the album released in 2021. Here the trio's gothic-tinged post-punk blends naturally with turbulent flashes of unmistakable shoegaze, in an emotional crescendo not far removed from the best of Slowdive, raising the Icelandic trio's mysterious allure to the nth degree.
This article is an English translation of the original Italian text, published on OndaRock.it. It was translated with the help of artificial intelligence, under the editorial responsibility of OndaRock's editor-in-chief, Claudio Fabretti.
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