NYTT LAND - Ritual

With their new album, “Ritual”, Nytt Land arrive at the renowned Napalm Records. The Siberian Nordic Ritual Folk duo, made up of Anatoly and Natasha Pakhalenko, further develops their original approach: a Nordic shamanism that starts out in the Russian taiga and travels all the way to Scandinavian lands. Their work binds together folkloric traditions from Asian Russia with suggestions drawn from Norse mythology and texts like the Poetic Edda. The result is a new strain of ambient/ritualistic neofolk that falls in line with the work of artists such as Wardruna, Forndom and, above all, Heilung.

Worth remembering that the band has been active since 2013. This is their sixth album, one that follows in the wake of the excellent “Cvlt”, a work released only last year that marked a turning point for Nytt Land's sound.

“Ritual” is an intense, shamanic record. Listening to it, an inner, primordial energy emerges, marked out by drumbeats and vocal mantras that seem to envelop, draw in, or hold dark spirits at bay. The whole thing is embellished by the use of traditional stringed and wind instruments.

The lyrics of the title track that opens the album are drawn from the skaldic poem Darraðarljóð, also known as the Song of the Valkyries. As per Scandinavian tradition, the wind is associated with the fate of the souls of the dead.

Also standing out across the album is the excellent “U-Gra”, a song belonging to a native Siberian tribe called the Khanty, a chant dedicated precisely to their guardian spirits. “Svartravn”, meanwhile, tells the story of a dying warrior recounting his heroic deeds to a raven on a battlefield. In Scandinavian and Siberian culture, the raven is a keeper of memory and a messenger between worlds, between the living and the dead. It's a folkloric topos, further evidence of a shared Eurasian, Indo-European origin. There are many similarities that sit at a deep cultural level before even a linguistic one, similarities that settle somewhere between the "sema" and the "soma".

Nytt Land act as bearers of archaic, ancestral forces and suggestions buried in memory. These are all elements transposed into a contemporary music that reworks, in its own personal way, folk traditions, shamanism and Norse worship. In a dark moment for the world, the fire of tradition still burns. Listening to Nytt Land's music, it feels like you can still make out a bonfire in a frozen forest. Perhaps not everything is lost.

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29/08/2021