Motorpsycho - The psychedelic hard rockers

From Trondheim, a Norwegian city close to the Arctic Circle, come Motorpsycho, one of the most surprising acts in 90s rock and, at the same time, one of the least known to the wider public. Across their huge body of studio work, and even more so in their long, aggressive live shows, Motorpsycho display an extraordinary eclecticism, and a truly rare ability to absorb the lessons of their disparate mentors (from the Who to Pink Floyd, from Sonic Youth to Dinosaur Jr.), blending and updating them with a healthy dose of their own personality.

The original nucleus, made up of Bent Saether (vocals and bass) and Hans Magnus “Snah” Ryan (guitar and vocals), came together in the late Eighties. With drummer Kjell Runar “Killer” Jenssen, the two chose the name Motorpsycho after seeing the Russ Meyer film of the same name in London (“'Mudhoney' and 'Faster Pussycat' had already been taken,” they later joked), and recorded a first demo, pressed onto around a hundred cassettes (“Maiden Voyage”, 1990), split evenly between heavy rock and lo-fi acoustic psychedelia.

Their proper debut came in 1991 on Voices Of Wonder, with the album Lobotomizer: an extremely heavy monolith straddling stoner, metal, grunge and hardcore. The vocals are almost always screamed and guttural, the rhythms slow and martial, the sound heavy and extremely dirty, not helped by a less-than-convincing production. The only tracks of a different nature are perhaps the most interesting ones: the title track opens the album with acoustic guitars, counter-vocals and detuned violins; “Hogwash” is a full-blown Seventies mammoth with an endless solo on Snah's (imprecise) guitar; “Frances” could pass for a Dinosaur Jr. song, rough and fast. These are the first hints of the revolution Motorpsycho would soon undergo, first by replacing “Killer” with the more skilled and creative Hakon Gebhardt behind the drums (the three would form the band's unshakeable backbone through the years, surrounding themselves from time to time with more or less close collaborators, but always remaining the group's pillars), and then by tackling the first of the endless series of singles and EPs they would release throughout their career (averaging two or three EPs for every album released, each with four or five new tracks): 8 Soothing Songs For Ruth, actually a fusion of two earlier separate works, Soothe and 3 Songs For Ruth, hints at an opening toward more melodic yet at the same time experimental shores (the beautiful “Lighthouse Girl”). Confirmation comes with the second LP, a double album titled Demon Box, where the band moves seamlessly from the bittersweet, ironic bucolic country of “Waiting For The One” to the anthem “Nothing To Say”, from the death-prog of “Feedtime” to the west-coast psychedelia of “Tuesday Morning”, from the indie rock of “Junior” to the hardcore of “Sunchild”. A cauldron of disparate influences and sounds, perhaps even too scattered, but decidedly powerful, also thanks to the grit of the three musicians, who make up for certain technical shortcomings (never too compromising, in any case) with taste, personality and passion: Saether is a very “guitar-like” bassist, with a style that clearly draws on the most aggressive side of Entwistle, often filling, with a very full and often saturated, distorted sound, even the spaces that would be left to a second guitar, and vocally he's capable of remarkable solutions across a considerable range, despite rather limited technical training; Snah, while not especially fast-handed, has an almost Gilmour-like taste for finding the right notes on every occasion, and is capable of long, vaguely bluesy improvisations; Gebhardt, besides being an excellent banjo player, is a precise and imaginative drummer, clearly inspired by the Keith Moon school, especially when it comes to the more violent rhythms (it's no coincidence that Motorpsycho would often play Who songs live).

Demon Box was named best rock album of 1993 in Norway, and the band's name started to become known beyond its borders too: signing to the German label Stickman Records opened up new possibilities, and Motorpsycho began touring relentlessly across Europe, turning into a formidable live machine that over the years would reach extraordinary levels of intensity and power (as well as stamina: their shows often run well over three hours, night after night for weeks on end).

Their next full-length, Timothy's Monster (1994), established Motorpsycho as one of the biggest names on the European underground scene, cementing their status as a still niche but hugely devoted cult act. The record is a monumental triple album (double CD) explicitly split into two parts: the first consists of eleven colourful tracks that nonetheless orbit the indie rock planet, sometimes in its more pop-leaning expressions (“Trapdoor”, “Now It's Time To Skate”, “Wearing Yr Smell”), sometimes in its more psychedelic forms (“Giftland”, “Watersound”, “Kill Some Day”), and sometimes in more lo-fi, experimental territory (“A Shrug And A Fistful”, “Feel”); the second consists of just four long, carefully structured songs, ranging from the extremely powerful psychedelic heavy-prog of “The Wheel” to the death-industrial of “Grindstone”, touching on territory reminiscent of Nick Drake's poetics on the acoustic “Sungravy”, and closing with the epic space-suite “The Golden Core”, one of the absolute peaks of the band's output, where bass, guitars, mellotron and marimba merge into a slow, apocalyptic crescendo. The moods are generally dark, or at least melancholic, even when the music might at first glance suggest otherwise; the trio's instrumental skill improves, Saether's voice definitively sheds its rougher edges in favour of a slacker-leaning delivery, and the sound stays dirty while being enriched with new instruments and textures.

Setting aside their EP output, which as noted is truly vast, the official discography continues with Blissard (1996). This time the band merges strongly indie-rock leanings, Dinosaur Jr above all, with a few new wave echoes, producing ten tracks that are almost all fast-paced (standouts include “The Nerve Tattoo”, “S.T.G.” with a chilling atmospheric ending, and the ballad “Manmower”, bolstered by Mercury Rev-like reverbs), made all the more appealing by a production that's still vaguely lo-fi, something that from the following albums onward would be refined into an extremely precise, powerful sound, a wall of sound like few others heard in Nineties rock. Once again melancholy reigns supreme, and Saether's lyrics (the band's main songwriter) grow increasingly deep, meditative and fundamentally pessimistic, as befits any self-respecting Nineties rock album... And it's precisely the following album, Angels And Daemons At Play from 1997, that can rightly be considered a “summa” of independent rock of that decade, in its jumble of styles and musical directions whose only common denominator is guitars, fired straight at your face with their warm, raw sound, and Saether's raspy voice, alternating with or merging into Snah's deeper, almost Wright-like one, all submerged beneath the wall of decibels created by the trio (who, starting with this record, begin to decisively expand each musician's range: the three try their hand at piano, Rhodes, mellotron, percussion of every kind, swap guitars and basses, and bring in violinists, noise-makers and “musique concrète” players, making their sound absolutely unique and thoroughly dense). Standouts on the tracklist include the syncopated fun-rock of “Walking On The Water”, the Sonic Youth-esque “Pills, Powders And Passionplays”, the perfect guitar-driven pop rock of “Starmelt/Lovelight”, the lo-fi minimalism of “Stalemate”; and above all the 13-minute psycho-space-noise ride “Un Chien D'Espace”, a masterpiece and live staple for the band in many concerts to come, whose instrumental interlude sees the guitars chasing each other, pursued by theremin, saws, oscillators and more. A dark album from the artwork onward, black and smoky, Angels And Daemons is an essential piece in the mosaic of guitar rock straddling experimentation and accessibility, and definitively proves the trio's maturity on an instrumental level too.

Motorpsycho's prolificacy is staggering: the following year the band released another double album — Trust Us — yet another string of excellent songs, verging on masterpieces. A more cohesive record than its predecessor, it takes as its reference point a space rock halfway between the heaviest and the most psychedelic sides of the Seventies, with several tracks running over eight minutes and long instrumental crescendos painting vast canvases of sonic impressionism. Worth remembering above all are “The Ocean In Her Eye”, which combines a certain Radiohead-like languor with a hazy, cosmic sound echoing Spacemen 3; “Vortex Surfer”, the band's anthem par excellence and closing number of their shows in the years to follow, a heart-wrenching melody over a granite-solid guitar wall of sound; “Radiance Freq.” and “Taifun”, two largely instrumental pieces of truly accomplished sonic power and melodic perfection; and, on the more pop-rock side, the gorgeous “Hey Jane” and “Mantrick Muffin' Stomp”. Another album of really top-tier quality, with liquid atmospheres — but a thick, colourful liquid, warm and enveloping even in its roughest moments.

By this point, the trio seem to feel the need to seek new paths, and abandoned the valve distortion and cascades of watts (but not before releasing an exceptional live album with the ironic title Roadwork vol.1 – Heavy Metall Iz A Poze, Hardt Rock Iz A Leifschteil, which documents their improvisational skills and the sheer power they'd reached in their shows), turning 180 degrees toward Sixties-rooted pop made of acoustic guitars, strings and horns, also kicking off fruitful collaborations with classical or avant-garde instrumentalists, including the Norwegian ensemble Jaga Jazzist: the result is a nine-song gem, Let Them Eat Cake (2000), which wrong-foots longtime fans with its air of an amused (and explicit) homage to the “Fabulous Sixties”, somewhere between Beatles, acoustic Pink Floyd and Beach Boys. That said, “The Other Fool”, “Upstairs/Downstairs” and “My Best Friend” are genuinely beautiful songs, enriched by baroque arrangements that are never overly pretentious and show the band's usual, exquisite melodic taste.

After the mini-CD Barracuda, another tongue-in-cheek homage, this time to the most stereotypical Seventies hard rock (just look at the photo inside the booklet, truly amusing), featuring at least a couple of great tracks, “Dr. Hoffmann's Bicycle” and “Heartbraker”; and after the second volume of the Roadwork series, subtitled The Motor Source Massacre, which presents an old 1995 concert played together with The Source — an experiment, admittedly only partially successful, in fusing Motorpsycho's then-still metallic sound with jazz avant-garde — comes the less satisfying Phanerothyme, from 2001: it seems the band got a bit too fond of the game of quotation, and this time the album's nine tracks draw mostly on a vaguely progressive early-Seventies pop-rock, somewhere between Gentle Giant, Doors-isms (the solo on “Go To California” is clearly modelled on the chord progression of “Light My Fire”) and a now slightly overblown profusion of strings, flutes and horns. The instrumental skill and melodic taste are by now beyond question, but what seems to be missing is that urge to explore and take risks that had always defined their work. The same can be said of the following It's A Love Cult (2002), which, while returning to more restrained arrangements, often indulges in gratuitous quotation bordering on plagiarism, this time leaning mostly toward Mid-Seventies atmospheres (“Carousel” is really too similar to Led Zeppelin's “The Rain Song”; the opening “Uberwagner” lifts wholesale kraut rhythms, shamelessly citing Neu!, while “Neverland” could pass for a cover by some late-Sixties Californian garage surf band): the trio's flair and creativity get watered down and faded by what by now seems like an out-of-control urge to flaunt their musical knowledge, and to amuse themselves by stacking quotation upon quotation in a somewhat sterile game of 'who does this remind us of?'. The result is an excess of pretentiousness that enriches the sound more than the substance, turning these later albums into perfectly crafted pop-rock artefacts, but ones certainly lacking in soul and passion.

In 2003, the mini-album In The Fishtank, recorded at the studios of the Dutch label Konkurrent together with their by-now-inseparable friends in Jaga Jazzist, seems to try to correct course (even if the tracks Motorpsycho recorded are all reworkings of older material), bringing the music back to a more immediate, enjoyable dimension without sinking into quotation for its own sake.

Black Hole/Black Canvas (2006) is a double album in which Bent Saether and Snah Ryan indulge the logorrhea that, for better or worse, has always marked their career.

There are few truly memorable tracks (the heavy pop of “In Our Tree” or “Hyena”, the superior ballads “The 29th Bulletin” and “Before the Flood”), and more of a string of deluxe filler — good, but already heard before — along with no shortage of dead spots/rehashes of the old repertoire (the psychedelic rides, the heavy pop-song, and so on). As if, rather than a new album, this were a compilation of outtakes from 1994-2000. Devoted fans of the band will find more than one echo of the “Angels and Daemons at Play” era in the pop songs that explode into space-prog fragments (“Kill Devil Hills”, “Triggerman”); heavy riffs from the “Trust Us” era (the pentatonic earworms of “Coalmine Pony” or “L.T.E.C.”, for instance); more than one callback to the electricity of “Blissard” (“Sail On”, “The Ace”) or to certain psych-pop rides from their most recent period.

In 2008 the Norwegian band returned with Little Lucid Moments, four long tracks including a suite in four movements, marked by extremely long rides, jamming, sudden shifts in register and an almost progressive sense of melodrama.

From the very first seconds of the title track we're assaulted by a drum roll and a whirlwind of guitars that rage throughout the whole first movement, “Lawned”, a great display of skill, with its constant ups and downs; a very brief hazy interlude separates it from “A Hoof To The Head”, in which their driving, bass-driven rides come back to life, sped up to an almost impossible degree. Once this interlude is over, here's another soft passage (with vocals that couldn't sound more Seventies) and more (dispensable) psych rambling padding things out, ahead of the final explosion in the very last minutes (Hawkwind are just around the corner).

A constant change of scene is “Year Zero (A Damage Report)”, with its irresistible melancholic vocals and guitar interplay, now ethereal, now devastating, and a rock-solid rhythm section, though here too part of the running time feels wasted. After two episodes of real substance, the weak points start to stand out, like the halting progress of “She Left On The Sun Ship”, with its soft/loud pattern stretched out over an (excessive) quarter of an hour. The contrast between the hard rock gut-punch of the intro and a continuation steeped in faint, acid psychedelia is no small thing for a band that has known how to blend these two elements to perfection. The music fades out at the end and we're catapulted into the final track, “The Alchemyst”, which, in contrast, builds entirely as a crescendo, from its hushed opening to guitar barrages culminating in a thunderous final solo, with drums going wild (credit to the new recruit, Kenneth Kapstad).

This is what Motorpsycho could offer in 2008: music out of time and already heard before, but played with imagination and passion.

The band returned in 2009 with an album marked by a difficult and unusually (for them) long gestation, born from sessions recorded with Steve Albini at Electrical Audio studios in Chicago, then completed a few months later at a small studio on Norwegian soil.

Child Of The Future is the result of that effort, a work that once again showcases a fine, granite-hard and forceful sound. Longtime members Hans Magnus Ryan and Bent Sæther are joined by drummer Kenneth Kapstad, by now a permanent fixture of the line-up. The album's impact risked being hampered by the decision to release it only on vinyl, a choice that could well limit its circulation.

The band sails between psychedelic digressions and walls of riffs, always on the hunt for the right melodies. The opener "The Ozzylot" and the title track are mighty stadium-rock numbers packed with killer riffs, sturdy rhythms, granite-solid bass lines and melodic turns. "Riding The Tiger", "Cornucopia" and "Mr. Victim" come across as scorching electric rides that grab you from the very first listen. "Whole Lotta Diana", on the other hand, represents the Trondheim trio's usual journey into the guts of very Seventies-style hard rock, built on complex structures. The only breather comes with the relaxed "The Waiting Game", filler material probably born out of some laid-back home recordings.

Just a few weeks after the release of "Child" came yet another new album from the trio, Heavy Metal Fruit (2010), described by Bent Sæther as "the heaviest thing we've done in 15 years". A "massive" record that shows a somewhat sharper sense of direction, even if the band still has the flaw of letting the music simply flow, without heeding the risks of a hard-psychedelic jam dragged out a little too long.

With special guests Mathias Eick on trumpet (Jaga Jazzist) and Hanne Hukkelberg on vocals, the album entrusts "Starhammer" with the task of setting its coordinates: a powerful, "metallic" sound that dissolves into hypnotic phrasing à-la "Dark Star" before regaining momentum, right up to its lysergic final flourish. Both the emphatic urgency of "X-3 (Knuckleheads in Space)" – with flashes of free jazz in its central section – and the mammoth propulsion of "W.B.A.T." bring to mind some proto-metal band on a trip through outer space.

All of it already heard and thoroughly digested before, but it's still quite something to be confronted with the ruinous interstellar catastrophes of "The Bombpoof Roll And Beyond". Then, though, you have to reckon with the out-of-place sappiness of the ballad "Close Your Eyes" and with the grand finale of "Gulliver's Travails Pt. I-IV", which manages to heighten the album's progressive streak while also exposing all the cracks of a rather dried-up inspiration.

Two years go by, and then comes The Death Defying Unicorn.

Originally commissioned by the Molde International Jazzfestival for its fiftieth-anniversary celebrations and later rearranged and polished up, under the supervision of Kåre Chr. Vestrheim (already co-producer of the previous album), the "opus" (that word actually seems more fitting here...) opens with the chamber-like dance of "Out Of the Woods", before diving, without a break, into the tumultuous trajectories of "The Hollow Lands", where the fairy-tale and the heaviness go hand in hand, fused into one single, rock-solid psych-prog block.

An insistent conclave of horns, on the other hand, opens the more measured and adventurous "Through The Veil", into which the sparkling orchestrations of the Orchestra are woven.

The album – which also features, among others, Ståle Storløkken of Supersilent – certainly has its moments of real interest, but it isn't free of sterile instrumental passages, something of a mixed blessing for a work that tries to stay balanced between evocativeness and rawness, to the point of splitting its own soul in two, as shown by "Into The Gyre", whose atmosphere is first turned into a jazz-rock chase and then resolved into a mysterious cosmic coda.

After all, ambition can also lead toward solutions that verge on the saccharine (take, for instance, the grandiose invocation of "Oh Proteus – A Prayer" or the tiptoeing chamber textures of "Sharks") or ones that amount to a lot of noise over nothing (the rocky, hard-edged "Mutiny", whose violin lines inevitably bring to mind the "flights" of Jean-Luc Ponty).

Still, passages like "La Lethe" (a long odyssey of the damned that seems to echo some pages out of the Carla Bley/Paul Haines partnership) or the Seventies-prog triumph of "Into The Mystic" weigh decidedly in the album's favor, so one can turn a blind eye...

On April 16, 2013, Still Life With Eggplant was released, marking a return to a certain brand of hard rock steeped in psychedelia. For the occasion, the line-up was expanded to a fourth member: guitarist Reine Fiske. The album contains five tracks, among them "August", their personal reworking of a song by Love.

On March 7, 2014, Behind The Sun came out, on which the sound is further enriched by the presence of the Sheriffs Of Nothingness (winners of a Norwegian Grammy in 2007 for Best Contemporary Music Album), namely Ole Henrik Moe and Kari Ronnejlev, who add lush string seasoning to the album's rich arrangements.

October 2015: time for anniversaries. To celebrate 25 years of activity, a biographical book and the band's first retrospective were published: Supersonic Scientists.

Here Be Monsters, released on February 12, 2016, opens with a piano: an unusual opening gambit for the Norwegian trio, who once again present themselves to their audience with the intention of engineering stylistic evolutions. These evolutions continue to come through the choice of valuable collaborators, and this time, in place of the guitars of "additional member" Reine Fiske, we find keyboardist Thomas Henriksen, crucial in making the overall atmosphere elegant and steeped in melody, as immediately shown by the Pink Floyd-esque "Lacuna/Sunrise", a sumptuous performance that rightfully ranks among the best in the band's recent discography. The tracks on Here Be Monsters were conceived for the centenary celebrations of the Norwegian Technical Museum together with Stale Storlokken, a musician with a jazz background known in the scene for his numerous collaborations; among other things, he had already crossed paths with Motorpsycho on "The Death Defying Unicorn" in 2012 and "En Konsert For Folk Fiest" in 2015. But when it came time to record the tracks, it was Henriksen who manned the synths, and his hand is felt in the instrumental "Running With Scissors", the link between Motorpsycho's classic sound and something that in a way recalls prog structures and (at times) fusion, frontier territories already explored, but never so vividly.

The more canonical "I.M.S." (Inner Mounting Shame) is the inevitable, imperious electric ride, while "Spin, Spin, Spin" is a brilliant electro-acoustic psych-folk ballad, complete with flower-power-style vocal interplay, originally written in 1968 by Black singer-songwriter Terry Callier for H.P. Lovecraft's second album. "Big Black Dog" is the long final crossing that opens with bucolic flavors before launching into the usual hard-psych scenery, where the Norwegians' never-dormant tendency toward gigantism resurfaces, as they too often let themselves get carried away by a taste for endless onslaughts. Refined, but not without sharp electric edges, Here Be Monsters shows us a band that's always hyperactive, constantly searching for evolutions and cross-pollinations, once again intent on broadening its stylistic range and never selfishly closed in on itself. Given a certain accessibility to the final result, we might hope these tracks would finally manage to win over even those who've never quite digested Motorpsycho. It's something we find ourselves hoping almost every time they release a new album, and in the end perhaps we don't even mind that much that these gentlemen continue to remain a rich treasure known to few, despite more than twenty-five years of memorable records.

One of Motorpsycho's recurring obsessions, the imaginary soundtrack, is satisfied with the inconsequential but occasionally experimental Begynnelser (2017).

Heir to the double albums Demon Box, Timothy's Monster, Trust Us and the more recent Black Hole/Black Canvas, the colossal The Tower (2017), bolstered by new drummer Tomas Jarmyr, is one of their most typical time machines. As usual, it looks back both through their own history, in yet another rendering of themselves, and into the era of total experiences spanning the Sixties and Seventies. Its long runtime brings with it at least a few good moments, all clustered at the start, from the blazing title track to the crowd-pleasing boogie of "Bartok Of The Universe", to the Deep Purple-esque "A.S.F.E.". The second half settles into ballads, often inappropriately padded out with long jazz-rock progressions. The result is not their most complete and sprawling work, but rather a record that wears out even fans of the trio, making one long for their humbler pop side (here on full display in the two short, acoustic "The Maypole" and "Stardust").

The Crucible (2019) is a return to decidedly higher levels, with three long tracks that are veritable textbooks of rock history and show a marked preference for the sound of King Crimson, across all the various seasons experienced by Fripp's band. The opening of "Psychotzar" is overtly Black Sabbath before traveling through progressive worlds interspersed with psychedelic passages and massive riffs. It's the shortest and most energetic track. "Lux Aeterna" begins as a ballad somewhere between early King Crimson and Yes, before loading up on synths and horns and exploding into a chaotic instrumental section with dizzying chases and soaring solos. The peak arrives in the twenty minutes of "The Crucible", a monumental suite between prog and psychedelia where this time the main references are to the King Crimson of "Larks' Tongues In Aspic" (evident from the 3:36 mark) before transforming into the Yes of "Close To The Edge" (from the 4:10 mark). But regardless of these references, which are ultimately beside the point, what we have here are twenty relentless minutes where nostalgia isn't a sad memory but becomes a great celebration.

The All Is One (2020) closes out the "Gullvåg Trilogy" - so named after the artist behind the three cover paintings, Håkon Gullvåg - the same way it began, with a grand exercise in nostalgia for the rock that once was, constantly quoted and paid tribute to, particularly on the album's centerpiece, the monumental suite "N.O.X.", split into five parts for a total of forty-two minutes, which unhesitatingly stakes its claim as the best suite of the year. From the lysergic opening with Byrds-style psychedelic vocals, through the constantly progressive-style accelerations and decelerations, to the Floyd-esque fourth part, right up to the finale played at breakneck speed that reprises the opening melody, with abundant imagination and craft, everything here is flawless and shows no signs of flagging despite its unusual length. Inspired by paintings, alchemy and tarot, it is in some ways even a radical piece of their discography, a summation and a culmination of a thirty-year career.

Everything else pales next to such greatness. Despite its excellent quality, the title track is all too derivative of Genesis and Yes, and tracks like "The Same Old Rock" make their constant self-referencing clear from the title alone. There's no shortage of psych-folk references, from the stricter instrumental folk-revival of "A Little Light" to the folk-ballad format of "The Dowers". "Like Chrome" closes things out with an enveloping, Crimson-esque guitar riff, the perfect closing moment to yet another progressive celebration to which Motorpsycho have kindly invited us.

Kingdom Of Oblivion was born in the wake of the magnificent The All Is One, perhaps repeating the same flaws (excessive length, seventy minutes) but also following in its footsteps in terms of its strengths, even without reaching the apotheosis of the "N.O.X" suite. Among the twelve tracks, the longer ones certainly stand out, those that come closest to the idea of a suite, with shifting tempos and growing complexity. The title track is a case in point, going from a Sabbath-esque riff to a more typically progressive succession of well-judged melodies and epic flourishes.

The apotheosis, however, is reached in "The Transmutation of Cosmoctopus Lurker", a peak of complexity, shifting tempos and prog-metal aggression. An evolved form of hard rock with no obvious nods to any particular band (unlike others) is found in the remarkable "The Waning", split into two parts, and in "The United Debased", which is fairly close to the sound of Deep Purple. Also worth noting is "At Empire's End", a track typically poised between prog and neo-prog (a bit Yes, a bit Porcupine Tree), in perfect balance between the two influences.

Aside from that, there are plenty of short acoustic tracks (among them the typical Byrds-style psych-folk of "Lady May") and a haunting cover from Hawkwind's classic LP "Doremi Fasol Latido" ("The Watcher", the only track on the album written by Lemmy Kilmister).

The stasis imposed by the lockdowns that marked the pandemic period also led Motorpsycho to work on new material. The summer of 2022 is the season that brings the release of Ancient Astronauts, about sixteen months after the previous album: an eternity if you consider the sheer prolificacy of the Norwegian band in recent years. Their blend of progressive rock and psychedelia stays at a very high level right from the opener "The Ladder", seven minutes that travel between Yes and King Crimson (the latter mainly recalled through their '90s/2000s repertoire) with further nods to the more aggressive textures of the more recent Porcupine Tree.

"The Flower of Awareness" is a dark instrumental preamble that introduces the twelve minutes of "Monna Lisa / Azrael", a piece that, after a symphonic introduction very reminiscent of Crimson's "Epitaph", starts swaying through the progressive universe, between dizzying odd time signatures built on softer sections (mellotron, strings and metallophones), fierce passages carried by the bass/drums rhythm section, blazing guitar solos, and instrumental interludes that take on the character of improvised jams.

Things get even more serious over the twenty-two minutes of "Chariot Of The Sun - To Phaeton On The Occasion Of Sunrise (Theme From An Imagined Movie)", conceived along the same lines as the captivating, evocative suite "NOX" featured on The All Is One from 2020. It's the longest track Motorpsycho have ever recorded, and that speaks volumes about what awaits in a piece that rightfully takes its place among the cornerstones of their entire output.

For Yay!, released in June 2023, Motorpsycho return to embrace a more relaxed mood, closely related for long stretches to the English folk scene of the Sixties, setting aside their granite-like Scandinavian riffs. And they do so with real command of their craft and the necessary artisanal care that such material demands, layering acoustic guitars, harmonizing vocal melodies, and supporting the rhythmic backbone mainly with unobtrusive percussion. The opening "Cold & Bored" and "Sentinels" immediately paint a scene with floral, crystalline textures. The moods are relaxed, dreamlike, the approach singer-songwriterly, dare I say Canterbury-esque, with an almost exclusively unplugged feel, opting for once for a contained running time.

But the eclecticism that has always governed the artistic path of Bent (who wrote all the tracks) and Snah means that welcome discontinuities emerge along the psych-folk path of Yay!, as in the fine uptempo "Patterns", where drums and electric gear make an entrance - albeit with due delicacy - and even more so in the extraordinary seven minutes of "Hotel Daedalus", one of the best compositions Motorpsycho have written in the last decade, essentially their own "Kashmir", which stands out from the rest of the record for the grandiloquence of its arrangement and an imperious central solo. All just to make sure they don't let go of their approach as psychedelic Viking warriors, never tamed.

Rightly regarded as an absolute authority of Northern European louder psych-rock, Motorpsycho – while still turning out more than respectable albums – have for some time now failed to produce works capable of carving out a place of honour within a sprawling discography, one in which the absolute masterpieces remain those produced in the Nineties. The main virtue of the Norwegian trio – even in this mature phase – continues to lie in their ability to craft, with rigorous annual regularity, albums each marked by distinct, sharply defined characteristics.

2024 finds Bent and Snah offering up Neigh!!, an album of leftovers, of material that didn't find room on recent releases due to a lack of fit with their overall tone. These premises lead to an album that is certainly uneven yet unexpectedly coherent, one in which distinctive traits of their finest sound re-emerge alongside musical passions that never truly faded. The opening is encouraging: the lysergic drive of "Psycholab" wouldn't have been out of place among the gems crafted in the Nineties, and the acoustic harmonies of "Return To Sanity" develop in full continuity with the folk attitude of Yay!. Things change as soon as the hard rock streak resurfaces, along with the vintage aesthetic that has marked the band's most recent output, here in many instances lacking punch as well as any particular originality. "This Is Your Captain" never takes off and the production's emphasis on falsetto is almost irritating, "Crownee Says" is a forgettable track, and it's hard to grasp the point of the fragment "Edgar's Bathtub" within the context.

There's no shortage of flashes of class, though: the razor-sharp revisiting of Skip Spence's "All My Life (I Love You)" and, above all, the breakneck "Elysium, Soon", which with its Zeppelin-esque echoes is worth the price of admission on its own. In other times, this material would have bolstered the long series of EPs released alongside their proper albums, works that were never superfluous and always distinguished by small, otherwise-unrecoverable gems. And perhaps that would have been exactly the right destination for it.

The following year the duo returns with a self-titled double album offering a rambling itinerary of new material, in perfect Motorpsycho style, put together with the help of a large group of Scandinavian cohorts, with Ingvald Vassbø and Olaf Olsen alternating on drums and the ever-faithful Deathprod sharing the production booth. A sequence that alternates punchy pop-rock songs ("Stanley (Tonight's The Night)", "Core Memory Corrupt") harking back to their early-2000s work with the sprawling psych/prog rides of recent times. The whole scenario is unmistakably theirs, able to satisfy both hardened psychonauts from the early days and newcomers to a sound that is by now surely not very original, but is certainly personal and inimitable.

Just listen to the driving bassline and Snah's scorching seventies solo in "Lucifer, Bringer Of Light", get lost in the epic twenty-one-minute odyssey of "Neotzar (The Second Coming)", or think back to the acoustic-lysergic vein of "Watersound" while listening to "Laird Of Heimly" to rediscover the codes consolidated over thirty-plus years of an honourable career. A journey through the ages of the Psychoverse in which disorienting passages also return – the opening of "Balthazaar" – along with those fleeting divertissements ("Kip Satie") often found on their EPs. Nothing new under the sun (and the moon, if one wants to reference the artwork), but the pleasure of rediscovering certainties that offer the comfort of an indestructible home, built on the most solid of foundations.

In 2026 it's the turn of their never-dormant passion for the seventies sound and sci-fi imagery to take centre stage. Ingredients drawn in handfuls from an epic past and filtered through the Motorpsycho imprint.

The Gaia II Space Corps thus returns to the dawn of hard rock, but does so by injecting into that material the shades of the psych vein in which the band remain undisputed masters, offering up a sound that is decidedly vintage, yet never mannered. And yet the unstoppable charge of "Fanny Again, Or" – the album's first single – seems to head straight towards bare, unvarnished homage with its Zeppelin-esque riffs, but it takes only the following "The Great Stash Robbery" to find the lysergic dimension again, with its gaze cast toward the depths of the cosmos. And while "TSMcR" sketches out a lopsided blues, further widening the scope, it's with "The Hornet" and "The Oracle" that the gospel of the Psychoverse shines through once more in full.

It falls to Reine Fiske and Olaf Olsen – alongside the ever-present Deathprod in the production booth – to back the two of them on this unusually concise, breakneck journey, whose closing track, a cover of Forst's "Black As Night", seals the dive into a glorious past, seen through the duo's own lens.

Contributions by Luca Fusari, Alessandro Nalon, Claudio Lancia ("Child Of The Future", "Still Life With Eggplant", "Behind The Sun", "Supersonic Scientists", "Here Be Monsters", "Yay!"), Francesco Nunziata ("Heavy Metal Fruit", "The Death Defying Unicorn"), Michele Saran ("The Tower"), Valerio D'Onofrio ("The Crucible", "The All Is One", "Kingdom Of Oblivion"), Cristiano Orlando ("Ancient Astronauts"), Claudio Lancia ("Yay!") and Peppe Trotta ("Neigh!!", "Motorpsycho", "The Gaia II Space Corps")

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