Doom was in the air when Slim0 took the stage on Saturday night at a sold-out Alice. In October, the band released the 17-track album FORGIVENESS—an album that takes a slow step into the riff-laden terrain of stoner rock. For this evening’s occasion, the Slim0 trio had been expanded with a lineup featuring Agnete Hannibal on cello, Aase Nielsen on saxophone, and Johan Polder on bass.

The sound exists somewhere between the English singer Dido, the drone-metal band Earth, and the drill trio Shooter Gang from Trillegården – an abstract comparison that hardly does justice to the uniqueness of the songs, as Slim0’s long referential tentacles stretch far beyond the music’s sharp contrasts. With its sacral-sounding choir and heavy drum passages, the single »Trenches« fit perfectly into the live setting. The darkness and the shifts between the three vocalists – from shared harmonies to growl – intensified the theatrical metal expression.

In a similar way, a nostalgic sigh arose when Dido’s catchy vocal lines from the hit »Thank You« emerged in the double cover »I Have But One Heart.« The perhaps lesser-known instrumental part, consisting of Earth’s »Coda Maestro in F Flat Minor«, turned the piece into a prime example of Slim0’s referential swamp brew. Although the many contrasts made for a rather epic concert, they also left me feeling somewhat conflicted. Conflicted because I genuinely enjoy Slim0’s heavy and fragmented universe, yet the lack of voluminous weight left me craving a more bone-rattling sound that could carve the sharp contrasts even more deeply. Hunger for more doom is certainly not a bad feeling, and I look forward to hearing the epic expression grow louder and even heavier.

As is often the case with soundtracks, musician and composer Søren Gemmer and the Greenlandic-Danish visual artist Jessie Kleemann tread a fine line on Lone Wolf Runner, whose music was originally written as the soundtrack to Kleemann’s performances of the same name in 2023 at the National Museum. How much of the original purpose (here, Kleemann’s performances) can and should be taken out of the equation for an album release to make sense?

In the PR material, the album is presented, among other things, as a postcolonial critique and an exploration of transcultural questions, which at first glance seems highly compelling – not least in light of the current geopolitical situation in which Greenland suddenly finds itself at the center. On a purely musical level, however, the release is not as gripping as one might have hoped. It lacks a stronger anchoring in a sense of purpose behind the music. Without having experienced Kleemann’s original performance, my impression is that the absence of precisely this aspect has left gaps too large for the otherwise, in many ways, intriguing music to fill on its own. Lone Wolf Runner is filled with references and hints of drama and storytelling that never quite come into their own.

There are nevertheless many interesting and exciting moments: Kleemann’s poetic voice, shifting not only between Greenlandic and Danish, but also between heavily vocoder-processed and seemingly untreated vocals. The atonal, hesitant, yet beautiful piano melodies in, among others, »The Dancer« and »Marble«, which create calm moments infused with tension. The industrial »The Skin«, halfway through the album, plants doubt about which direction the music is leading the listener. But in the end, Lone Wolf Runner lacks precisely what was cut away in the album’s process of becoming: a performance that can bind it all together.

To describe American Ethel Cain’s (Hayden Silas Anhedönia) stylistic shift from her debut Preacher’s Daughter (2022) to Perverts as an extreme U-turn would almost be an understatement. The distance from the debut’s gothic lo-fi pop to this monstrous work – combining dark ambient, noise, and dystopian ballads – is vast, all the while continuing Cain’s familiar reckoning with her religious upbringing and her struggle for sexual liberation.

On paper, Perverts is an EP running 89 minutes, but it feels like far more than that. Crushing noise drones, dusty piano strikes, and distant preacher voices from crackling radios are woven together with acoustic spaces. And although the record also contains more conventional ballads such as »Punish« and the beautiful »Vacillator« – which even features a clearly defined rhythmic progression – it is the long, epic ambient tracks that draw the listener into the often harrowing darkness.

One thing is that Cain suddenly makes dark ambient; another is just how good she is at it. Perverts is not only a profoundly unsettling insight into the friction between sexuality and religious fanaticism, but also an immediate, creative, and fully realized homage to a fascinating niche genre. A necessary album for anyone unafraid of the dark.