Kalandra unveil final single ‘A Ship Has Left the Shore’ ahead of new album release

Kalandra unveil final single ‘A Ship Has Left the Shore’ ahead of new album release

UK / EU tour announced with special guest singer-songwriter Finnegan Tui

The Other Side album due 13th November (By Norse)

The dream world has inspired many great works of art over the centuries. The phantasmagorical terrain inhabited by Lewis Carroll, Salvador Dali and David Lynch is where we now find Scandinavian alt-prog-folk artisans Kalandra, whose elegant blend of Nordic pop savvy and dark atmospheric rock has been a developing sensation for 15 years. Formed while the core members were studying at Paul McCartney‘s Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts, their remarkably assured 2020 debut album The Line – over 54 million streams and counting – was followed by 2022’s immersive video game soundtrack Kingdom Two Crowns: Norse Lands. In 2024, their captivatingly majestic A Frame Of Mind album powerfully affirmed Kalandra‘s ascendancy – as did their sold-out headline show at Oslo’s 1300-capacity Rockefeller venue earlier this year. Their proven genius for weaving ethereal melodies into raw and eerie musical landscapes makes them a perfect fit for a concept album about dreaming, as we are presented with on The Other Side.

Determining the theme before writing began, the band started ‘dream journalling’: jotting down their nocturnal visions and working them into songs. “It’s been very helpful to write down my dreams,” affirms singer Katrine. “It definitely affected how I wrote lyrics. I would love to do this again, have some sort of loose concept, it brings the record together.”

“Knowing the theme was dreaming was helpful to me musically too,” adds guitarist Florian. “We could have these dreamy effects in there. I feel most of the songs have nightmarish or dreamy parts, one way or another. There are still a lot of different themes here though, there’s folklore, current events, introspective stuff, life and death… Everything can fit into dreams lyrically speaking, it’s just life, it’s all-encompassing.”

Kalandra have long since settled into their own versatile musical identity, embracing effective contrasts between shimmering joy and aching melancholy, sounding atavistically ancient but stylishly contemporary, otherworldly but firmly rooted in woodland soil. Kalandra‘s open-minded, open-hearted signature sound may take in several reference points, but it remains impervious to easy categorisation. Freely cited inspirations on The Other Side‘s heavy guitar quotient include Alice In Chains and Bring Me The Horizon, while neoclassical legends Dead Can Dance, Norwegian electro-alt-rockers Pyke and Oslo ‘doomgaze’ unit Leonov also made their mark on Kalandra‘s creative psyche. Even so, this is a band that will always obey their own singular muse:

“To me it’s about trying to write something I haven’t heard before,” says Florian. “That’s not to say it hasn’t been done! But if I haven’t heard it before, then it piques my interest.”

Full bio by Chris Chantler HERE