VESLEMØY NARVESEN - Letting All Light Through

Acclaimed by Norwegian critics as an emerging talent of the contemporary jazz scene, drummer Veslemøy Narvesen confirms herself an artist of many musical nuances, little inclined to genre boundaries. Having embraced the joys of improvisation on her debut album "We Don't Imagine Anymore", Narvesen shifts perspective for a more ambitious record, drawing on the noble tradition of classical music — the Norwegian Broadcasting Orchestra was brought in for the recordings — but also on dreamy chamber-pop atmospheres. "Letting All Light Through" is an album to listen to closely, so rich in refined harmonic ideas and intricate arrangements that it can feel elusive. It's an album that stands apart from both jazz and classical music, yet also from that kind of pop that becomes a creative canvas for learned references, with an intensity that only Susanne Sundfør has previously conveyed with equal mastery.

Recorded at producer Håkon Brunborg's studio in Oslo, "Letting All Light Through" is an album that captures impressions suspended between freezing winter nights and sources of light, the fruit of a deep alchemy between Veslemøy and Håkon, but also of the contribution of young up-and-coming musicians from the Norwegian jazz and classical scene.

The evocative, fairy-tale piano notes that open the album, and the surreal interplay with the harp sound of "Prelude", throw open the doors to a sequence of tracks as elaborate as they are enveloping. Electronics creep in, evoking the Radiohead of "Kid A" in the bittersweet, unruly pulse of "Mad Lovers", while in "Forgive And Forget" the tension builds, with harps, strings, piano and drum machine intoning a pagan dance, as the two-voice dialogue between Veslemøy Narvesen and Bethany Forseth Reichberg brushes against naïve, childlike suggestions.

"Letting All Light Through" is like an album of photographs to be leafed through with care. A succession of elegant snapshots in which the ambitious, cultured jazz and neoclassical textures of "Adore", with their recurring key changes, alternate with more coquettish pages, where electronics become the primary source of digressions bordering on prog-rock ("Hold Me Closer"), while the faint melodies of "Best Of Our Lives" and the dream-pop suggestions of "Rules" fit together into a puzzle of unusual beauty.

But the crown jewel of an exceptionally cohesive and solid record is the even more adventurous "Treat Us Kinder", where rock-noise textures clash with chamber-pop dissonances and neoclassical interludes, and the heavy weight of drums and electric guitar is constantly diluted and diverted by piano and a cello that commandeers a string section as taut as a hard rock track. The effect is disorienting and intense, a sensation that persists throughout a record that stakes its claim as one of the revelations of the year.

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15/03/2026