JUNI HABEL - Evergreen In Your Mind

In 2023, the album “Carvings” revealed to the world the disarming beauty of the delicate, mysterious ballads penned by Norwegian composer Juni Habel.

Finding her again three years later with a batch of songs just as intense and crepuscular is one of those pleasures that isn't easy to put into words.

As intimate as they are essential, Juni Habel's compositions evoke the poetic integrity of Karen Dalton, Linda Perhacs and Vashti Bunyan, yet there's no aesthetic debt here that undermines her originality. What links the Oslo-based artist to the names above is a synergy of intent: behind the gentle, at times spectral, guitar arpeggios lie a spirituality and restlessness, a fragility and a faint poetics that need to be taken in as a whole.

A guitar and a voice: that's all Habel needs to conjure rich, multifaceted landscapes, stories that are complex yet simple and ordinary. Like a few well-placed brushstrokes on a canvas, the melodies hit the mark immediately (“Another High”); the eleven songs on “Evergreen In Your Mind” were written over the course of two years, left to slowly mature until they were stripped of any unnecessary embellishment.

Joys and sorrows alternate with equal intensity, while organ, piano, violin, synthesizers, percussion and electric guitars add subtle splashes of color without altering the largely acoustic nature of the tracks.

The album flows confidently through fluid, shifting arpeggios that make room for harmonic counterpoint (“I'd Like To See It”), raw fingerpicking paired with anguished, aching vocals (“I Lay My Trust”), and a gripping ballad built on flamenco chords and mournful melodies like a secular prayer (“Colours Close To Me”).

It's easy to lose yourself in the most captivating melodic phrasing of the luminous “Stand So Still”, or get caught up in the raw blues chords of “Sage”. Juni Habel is a skilled storyteller and an excellent guide through those spaces suspended between reality and dream. Even the most ambiguous symbolism, like the imagery of “Statues”, springs from reflections as bittersweet as they are comforting, and when for a moment the voice fades away, leaving room only for the instruments and a faint murmur (“Gitarhum”), it becomes clear that the term folksinger feels increasingly narrow and ill-suited to describe an album like “Evergreen In Your Mind”.

In this evolution from singer-songwriter to narrator of more complex sonic landscapes, Juni Habel has also brought in natural sounds captured through unconventional means (on “Pearl Cloud Song” you can make out the noise of a table leg) or by harnessing the natural reverb of the walls of her own home, while Stian Skadeen's production partly conceals the raw minimalism of the compositions.

To the many questions raised by the lyrics, Juni Habel offers no answers whatsoever: and it doesn't matter, because for the Norwegian artist this isn't some shallow philosophical infatuation, but a deep, mystical synergy with nature. “Evergreen In Your Mind” isn't just a collection of songs, but a place of the soul where there's still room for a magical utopia.

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10/05/2026