Alt-folk duo Nunnery Norheim will release their new album ‘I Saw the City’ on September 15th, a folk synth ballad weaving stories of cities remembered and imagined. Ahead of the release of their lead single on June 29th (also available via Bandcamp), we have the pleasure of sharing the accompanying lyric video by Andy Donovan.
Nunnery Norheim are screenwriter, award-winning playwright, songwriter, and singer Lizzie Nunnery and Vidar Norheim, a multi-instrumentalist, songwriter and producer, originally from Norway. They are both now based in Liverpool. Their debut album, Company of Ghosts, was released in 2010 on Fellside Records and reviewed by Neil McFadyen for Folk Radio, who said of Nunnery: She writes about real life with sincerity, from a living perspective, drawing on her own experiences and of those around her. This is a fine debut.
In 2018, we also interviewed Nunnery on the lead-up to the premiere of her new play with songs – To Have to Shoot Irishmen – which explored events around the murder of Irish Pacificst Sheehy Skeffington by a British soldier during the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916.
That living perspective of their debut is also present in ‘You Are Here’, on which Nunnery’s narrative soaks up small and intricate details that add colour and weight to the scene she paints of cities remembered and imagined.
We cycled east in Berlin
To catch a piece of war
A jazz band was rehearsing
Behind a half closed door
The map we lost in Neukölln
Was stained with rain and beer
And the sign posts, they all shouted:
‘You are here, you are here’
The soundscapes they generate around these lyrics are equally visual and immersive, highlighting their striking maturity and confidence as a duo and how their work has continued to evolve and reach new heights.
Lizzie Nunnery describes the writing process:
‘Early in the infamous spring of 2020, I started sketching a poem about faraway cities — trying to express some of that longing for a happier past and also for an alternate future that had been so suddenly disrupted. The imagined world outside our small rooms seemed suddenly fragile and unobtainable: ‘I’d like to go to Paris, but what if I arrive to find Paris up in flames? / I’d like to go to Venice, but what if I arrive to find Venice lost to rain.’ Vidar had some lovely pensive piano chords he’d been playing with for a while and a couple of lines he thought might fit a love song: ‘We broke down by river when we ran out of road / The padlocks on the railing were rusting in the snow.’ So, we threw our ideas together, and I started playing around with melody lines. Gradually, we realised we were mapping the geography of a love story. And as we worked, the song transformed into something hopeful and joyous — a celebration of the great scope of a relationship and an acknowledgement of the looping, expansive nature of time and space. We are in all the places of our past. When we love someone, we mark them on the landscape: ‘You are here, and you are here, and you are here… .’
The single is released on June 29th. Their album ‘I Saw the City’’ is set for release on September 15th, followed by a launch gig at The Music Room, Liverpool Philharmonic Hall on September 16th, supported by Sara Wolff, whom we recently featured here.
Find out more here: https://www.nunnerynorheim.com/