CHRISTIAN KJELLVANDER - Ex Voto/ The Silent Love

Twenty years have passed since the compilation “Cowboys In Scandinavia”, a Fargo release that opened the doors to a series of singer-songwriters coming out of the Nordic folk scene (Sweden and Norway in particular). Since then we've grown familiar with artists like Nicolai Dunger, Thomas Dybdhal, Tobias Froberg  or José Gonzales, while the most attentive listeners will also have noticed names like Junip, Tarantula and Christian Kjellvander. 

The author of country-noir albums built on a refined electro-acoustic balance, a singer with a deep, velvety voice, the melancholy poet of Ystad Christian Kjellvander returns to the spotlight with a new album, “Ex Voto/The Silent Love”, which completes a trilogy centered on romanticism in its most anguished, intimate form: the two previous chapters were released in 2020 (“About Love And Loving Again”) and in 2023 (“Hold Your Love Still”).

Produced by friend and colleague Tobias Froberg, recorded in an old house in the Swedish countryside, the Scandinavian artist's new album is the harshest and most anguished of the triptych: seemingly static in its slowcore–country pace, steeped in echoes and reverb, the result of an ingenious recording strategy. Kjellvander's voice was captured through an audio system placed in the middle of the room and recorded live with the echo effect created by the walls. 

“She asked me to ask her to love me and so I did, the hills lay silent, like the wilderness before us, you lay there gently stroking a feather, as we prepared to leave together”: this verse alone, together with the melancholy, minimal pulse of the opening track “Love Of Another”, is enough to get tangled in the enveloping web of the singer's voice and the plucked electric guitar strings, echoing like one final plea for love and death.

Shadows and ghosts are the protagonists of the aching, ethereal vibrations of "Hole In My Heart", or of the lonely, ominous guitar patterns of "It Can Heal You If You Let It", but the sonic palette of "Ex Voto/The Silent Love" is far broader than it first appears. Noise tears and gospel echoes are what raise the emotional stakes of the long goth-folk odyssey "The View Is Watching", while electronics get an unsettling incursion into the otherwise romantic, cavernous "God Simple", and there's a captivating, unpredictable, shape-shifting allure to "Deathrider", a track that briefly shatters the album's docile, deceptive surface.

None of the nine tracks are immune to the constant state of tension and conflict in the lyrics, or to the echoing, melancholy, heavy sonorities, where you can practically hear the wooden floorboards creak. Kjellvander holds his own alongside Leonard Cohen, immersed in a Mitteleuropean gothic atmosphere ("Obsession"), or matching the same descriptive stride as the Nick Cave of "Ghosteen" ("Ex Voto").

Thanks to an impeccable lyrical power ("Reasonable Love"), Christian Kjellvander seals one of the most accomplished records of his already long career, leaving a firm mark on contemporary singer-songwriter music. 

Please let me take care of your needs, find out what I need and bring it to me, we don't have to agree, but we can, when the first snow falls, we're all in the same boat.

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04/05/2026