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May 27, 2021 By Caleb Campbell

Copenhagen shoegaze outfit Himmelrum are quickly on the rise, making a name for themselves in their native Denmark with a combination of their impressive live show and their first two self-released records. Those two records earned the attention of Joyful Noise Recordings, purveyors of fellow glitchy, noisey, and experimental rock outfits like Deerhoof, Tropical Fuck Storm, and No Joy.

Himmelrum band have joined their roster for the band’s latest album, Vand, Død & Ensomhed, their first US release. The album’s title translates to Water, Death, and Solitude, with the three concepts forming a loose conceptual center of the record. The band are now back, sharing the video for the album’s opening track, “Sølvflod,” premiering with Under the Radar.

“Sølvflod”, Danish for Silver River, opens the ‘Water’ portion of the record. As the band describes, this portion of the record is themed around “‘Water’ as a metaphor for unity and in the biological sense of water as something that connects all life.” If you don’t speak Danish the thematic connections might very well go over your head, but the musical association with water is hard to miss on “Sølvflod.”

The instrumentation flows together with shimmering layers of synths, interlocking angelic harmonies, and shattered fragments of guitars. Much like the titular river though, the song quickly builds to a propulsive rush, compelled along by driving drumming and shoegaze-tinged guitars. The band lock into the song’s mercurial ebb and flow, an element imitated in the celestial imagery and watery distortions of the accompanying video.

Filmed in Hamburg, the video is a collaboration between Danish 3D artist Ida Lissner, Bianca Peruzzi on VFX and editing, and Lucas Kober doing the final grading. The trio says of the video, “The music video for Himmelrum’s ‘Sølvflod’ is a celebration of unity. Caught in angelic, painterly postures, the band members are enlightened beings in a moment of closeness framed by entangled nature. As the intense stream of images evolves, the band grows closer and closer together in an almost ritualistic manner in which they find unity as a collective of friends and musicians and with the world that surrounds them. The video is directed by the Italian filmmaker Bianca Peruzzi and based on a concept developed in collaboration with the German artist Lucas Kober.”

Check out the song and video below. Vand, Død & Ensomhed, out now via Joyful Noise Recordings.