Sometimes you might hear an artist described as a force of nature. It’s a figure of speech usually reserved for big or eccentric personalities, people whose artistic vision is put forward so confidently and with such power that it brooks no argument. This could be applied to the Swedish singer and musician Sara Parkman, whose fourth solo album Aster, atlas tackles the biggest themes: life, death, faith, grief, and the passage of time. But Parkman is a force of nature in another way. Her music has an inherent intensity that seems to be drawn from elemental sources. Listening to her singing and her highly original arrangements, we are constantly reminded of wild and unknown landscapes, and of our smallness within them, but also of our gardens, the things we cultivate, the minuscule and private and vanishing things that define our lives.
Seeing a live performance of Funeral Folk, the recent album Parkman recorded with Maria W Horn, was one of the most fierce and moving musical experiences I have witnessed, and she brings a similar energy to this new record. From its opening few seconds, it is uncanny and darkly magical. Bära mörker begins with quiet drones and long, drawn-out vocals with an incantatory quality. In its final moments, it shifts to a mass of high-pitched, elfin voices. It’s a breathtakingly weird gear change, but moments like that occur all over the album. Svarta tråden (which translates as The Black Thread, an image that gives you some idea of the album’s overall feel) combines gentle acoustic fingerpicking with subtle, dark electronics and dramatic, almost operatic flourish of Parkman’s vocals. A choir-like section then kicks in, adding a liturgical element to the song. The fact that you are never quite sure whether it’s Christian liturgy, black mass, pagan ritual or a combination of all of these things lends it a delicious ambiguity.
Things get even stranger from that point on. Paradiset combines scratchy, experimental fiddle sounds with an impassioned chant that accumulates power as it progresses. Then there’s a moment of release before sludgy electronics, processed beats and ecstatic bubbles of synth battle for supremacy. A kind of dark industrial folk buffets up against euphoric Euro-dance. The idea of paradise is certainly in there somewhere, but to reach it, you have to journey through a kind of limbo, between the rave and the grave. By contrast, In manus tuas pater is a melodic folk lullaby, soft and melancholic, where twitchy fiddles are pillowed by soft keys. There is a stately sweep of strings on Salomos vishet, and Parkman’s hushed and half-spoken vocals are full of yearning while the song’s dynamic reliance on long builds and sudden dips owes something to post-rock (as well as to church music and, perhaps, musical theatre).
Aster, atlas is an album that seems to flow, to tell a story that keeps a grip on you throughout its duration, even if you don’t know a word of Swedish. Parkman has an extraordinary sense of timing. Odlaren, which kicks off the second side, feels like a natural crux, a turning point in the album’s narrative. A simple melody that sounds like it could have been composed hundreds of years ago is sung with stillness and grace, and then the song is overcome by a quiet but disconcerting passage of gloopy, spooky electronica. The deep, soft pounding Tre hjärtan seems to tap into the workings and the urges of the human body, while Parkman displays a powerful gift for melody and a versatile but always haunting voice.
Modernisation without sanitisation is the order of the day. Parkman’s songs pay homage to the past, sometimes discreetly and sometimes overtly, but are always progressive or experimental in their outlook. Dickapolskan, the album’s sole traditional instrumental, is played with passion, depth and intensity, while Salikons rosor, with its opening fiddle, seems like it could at any point lapse into a traditional Scandinavian folk lament, but instead veers off gleefully into occult territory, with devilish percussion, dark synths and, finally, a soaring coda full of thickly layered chants and crushing beats.
Atser, Atlas ends with a prayer, or rather with Ora et labora, Latin for ‘prayer and work’. Parkman sings the title phrase like a mantra, with increasing intensity and complexity, while the by-now familiar dialogue between modern and traditional instruments plays out behind her like an unending battle, and, if you hadn’t realised it already, it becomes clear that this album contains within it many of the hardships and wonders of a human life. Parkman has given us something precious and gutsy, an album that, like the gardens that inspired it, has its own inscrutable rhythms of growth and decay.
Aster, atlas (May 8th, 2026) Supertraditional
Bandcamp: https://saraparkman.bandcamp.com/album/aster-atlas