VESLEMØY NARVESEN - Letting All Light Through

Hailed by Norwegian critics as an emerging talent of the contemporary jazz scene, drummer Veslemøy Narvesen confirms herself as a musician of many musical nuances, one little inclined to respect genre boundaries.

After embracing the joys of improvisation on her debut album "We Don't Imagine Anymore", the artist shifts perspective for a more ambitious record that draws on the noble tradition of classical music — the Norwegian Broadcasting Orchestra was brought in for the recordings — as well as on dreamy chamber-pop atmospheres.

"Letting All Light Through" is an album that demands close listening, so rich in refined harmonic ideas and intricate arrangements that it becomes elusive, an alternative to both jazz and classical music, but also to that kind of pop that becomes a creative canvas on which to lay learned references with an intensity that only Susanne Sandfør has previously expressed with equal mastery.

Recorded at producer Håkon Brunborg's studios in Oslo, "Letting All Light Through" is an album that captures suggestions poised between icy winter nights and sources of light, the fruit of a deep alchemy between Veslemøy and Håkon, but also of the contribution of emerging young musicians from the Norwegian jazz and classical scenes.

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

"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, learned jazz and neoclassical textures of "Adore", with their recurring key changes, alternate with playful pages where electronics become the primary source of almost prog-rock digressions on "Hold Me Closer", while the delicate, faint melodies of "Best Of Our Lives" and the dream-pop suggestions of "Rules" fit together into a puzzle of unusual beauty.

The standout of an otherwise remarkably cohesive and solid album is the even more adventurous "Treat Us Kinder", where rock-noise textures clash with chamber-pop dissonances and neoclassical interludes; the heavy sound of drums and electric guitar is constantly softened and diverted by piano and by a cello that commandeers a string section as taut as a hard-rock track. The effect is disorienting and intense, a sensation that runs constantly through an album that stands out as one of the revelations of the year.

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20/03/2026