Hér is still quite mysterious. The Polish band, currently absent from social media, is releasing its first album. The standard presentation evokes 11th-century Iceland (“hér” means “here”), the Poetic Edda, Odin, Old Norse... In short, it's a whole universe evocative of an aesthetic that we think we know by heart, but into which we immerse ourselves with the hope of a well-crafted ancestral ritual, like any ancestral ritual that can count on countless previous iterations. Yes, but there's a twist. No, Hér will not be your umpteenth “Viking shaman thing.”
Yet, with its enigmatic sound design evocative of forests and cold, its hypnotic martial percussion, and its guttural overtone singing chanting ancient things, Chants ticks several boxes of mystical Nordic folk in the vein of Heilung. Hér gradually draws us into a trance; it's immersive, well constructed... then a strangely modern, melancholic violin joins in, and we begin to wonder: what if we're in for a surprise?
The first track lasts ten minutes, giving us time to check out one detail: oh my, in their rare promotional photos, the members of Hér aren't wearing costumes! No animal skins, no horns, no runes, just plain black shirts! Fans of God of War and the Vikings series are starting to sweat: will we still be able to play the bodybuilding, virile, bearded but expertly waxed berserk? Needles and Bark then opens up the possibilities: Hér's musical horizon appears before us in all its splendor, immense and poetic. Imagine an unlikely encounter between Wardruna, Woodkid, David Bowie, Dead Can Dance, Tom Waits... a hybrid thing, where the ancestral gains a new dramatic tension thanks to violin strings and brass instruments that are tortured as if in a David Lynch film.
And that's when Hér's tour de force becomes clear. Music abolishes and transcends time. For the Polish band, it's not just a question of bringing back the past, but rather of destroying our temporal reference points... which, in any case, are nothing more than fantasy (after all, there are very few CDs recorded in the 11th century, maybe because the cold climate of Iceland did not help to preserve them). Between shamanic trance and the labyrinthine introspections of a film noir, Hér explores and brings new specters to life.
Monochrome is a nocturnal album. Its darkness is as much that of nights spent by the fire telling stories as it is that of solitude in a deserted, seedy bar (Slipknot), lost in regret. Creative and wildly elegant from start to finish, Hér creates a phantasmagorical space conducive to meditation (Patience in Observation) while adding a theatrical touch that multiplies its emotional impact. The finale of Farewell, twilight and palpably dramatic, is the ideal conclusion to set off into the night, or, on the contrary, to take advantage of the breaking dawn to venture into the unknown. It is there, on a piece of unexplored land that is a source of dreams, fears, and such beautiful stories, that we are most likely to find Hér, those crazy explorers whose first album is a poetic and mystical tour de force in a saturated universe that we thought our drakkars had already explored.
