Årabrot live in a church. Not metaphorically, guitarist and vocalist Kjetil Nernes and his partner Karin Park, who handles keys and vocals, actually converted an old Norwegian church into their home and studio. It’s the kind of biographical detail that would feel like a press release gimmick for most bands. For Årabrot, it just sounds accurate. Rite of Dionysus, their ninth full-length and the follow-up to 2023’s Of Darkness and Light, is music that takes place somewhere between sermon and seance.
The album opens with “I Become Light,” four and a half minutes that rise slowly from a near-silence into something weightless and declaratory. Nernes sings I wend my way / Spiritward over a guitar figure that opens like a hand reaching upward, and the song doesn’t so much build as ascend. It’s a disarming way to start, no shock, no assault, just a band walking you across a threshold.
“A Different Form” is where the record stretches out properly, five minutes of shape-shifting that earns its title. The song moves through several bodies before finding its final form: part wilderness march, part ritual incantation, the guitar and organ circling each other with patient intensity. It’s the album’s most hypnotic track, and the one that most clearly signals the direction Årabrot have chosen here, stranger, slower, more willing to let a moment sit in the room.
Not everything sits still. “Rock’n’Roll Star” is a genuinely funny and genuinely mean piece of mythmaking, Nernes casting music itself as a pagan deity demanding sacrifice, Karin Park’s presence in the arrangement giving the whole thing an eerie grandeur that keeps it from being a joke. “The Devil’s Hut” runs barely three and a half minutes and moves with a post-punk directness that the longer songs around it never attempt. It’s a reminder that this is a band with hooks, they just choose when to deploy them.
The album’s emotional core arrives late. “Mother” is four minutes of quiet devastation, the lyric treating grief like something holographic, shattered into pieces / but each one contains the whole of you, and the arrangement stripped back far enough that Karin Park’s voice carries the full weight of the song. It’s the kind of track that makes the noisier moments elsewhere feel earned. “Death Sings His Slow Song” follows with a chorus that repeats its title like a mantra until the repetition stops being bleak and starts being almost comforting, which is a strange and precise achievement.
The closer, “Of Darkness And Light,” deliberately shares a name with the previous album. It arrives like a resolution, warmer, almost dancefloor-adjacent by Årabrot’s standards, a hint that the darkness surveyed across the record can coexist with something livelier. It works as an ending precisely because it doesn’t offer false consolation, just a door held open.
Rite of Dionysus isn’t Årabrot’s loudest or most abrasive record. It is, arguably, their most complete, a nine-song ceremony that rewards patience and repays multiple listens with new details each time.
Standout tracks: A Different Form, Mother, Of Darkness And Light
