🔵 Juni Habel ○ Stand So Still

  From UNITED KINGDOMS 

Evergreen In Your Mind, the new and third album from Norwegian singer-songwriter Juni Habel, exists in two worlds at the same time. Songs were recorded in quiet corners of her home, on the piano in the school where she works, and it uses the physical world around her to provide percussion. It also takes place, as she herself attests, within a dream; an imagined place in which her desire for oneness with each other and the world around us is finally realised.

Evergreen In Your Mind was recorded with co-producer Stian Skaaden, it’s Habel’s first album in three-years, following the breakthrough success of 2023’s Carvings LP. Formed of eleven new recordings, the songs here remain delicate, Habel’s voice playing an elegant lead role – but there are fluctuations too.

These small shifts in Habel’s sound result in a notable stride forward. More focus went into the groove of these songs. Playfulness was embraced and, perhaps most importantly, patience played a fundamental role in shaping the album with time and care given to every element of these songs. “We always aim to capture effortlessness - but the way of getting there is anything but effortless,” Habel reveals. 

This extra time that was given to the project gave Juni the space to nurture her creativity. She would read and listen to music, hike into the hills, place herself within nature and seek out stillness. Not as a deviation from her work but as a fundamental part of the process. It’s a search for connection, and it’s a recurring theme across Evergreen In Your Mind; the polarity between stillness and passion, also our resistance to these desires, and the things we want to live and experience.

The album’s lead single 'Stand So Still' is indicative of this narrative where the protagonist is never quite able to discover whether standing still is a positive or negative act. "I don't think this song ever decided whether standing still is good or bad. And I don’t know myself!" Juni Habel

Perhaps it’s all in what surrounds you. While its opening moments feel something like an unearthed folk gem from times long past, the song soon finds its own path, the idiosyncratic nature of the album’s production gently rising to the foreground. Habel’s voice winds around itself and the strange, distinctive instrumentation drifts in to carry the song somewhere else entirely.

The album cover (below) for Evergreen In Your Mind also adds shimmer. A striking photograph of Juni among the mountains, it was taken on a day trip to Rondane, a five-hour drive each way from her home. Habel explains. “It was awe-inspiring to drive all the way up into the high mountains, with its wide plains and intense colours. For an album with music that at times likes to hide itself, I think it fitted nicely with such an epic, grand, and powerful landscape.”

"Fans of Nick Drake, Karen Dalton and Neil Young will find much to enjoy in this musical equivalent of an evening spent alone by the fireside.” The Times

"An affecting, timeless piece of work from a writer on song." The Observer

"there's also an underlying folk wildness, a sense of antique sheet music rustled by strong winds, muddy boots on piano pedals"  **** MOJO

"Carvings is a captivating musical and poetic experience, a fearless conception that is thoroughly contemporary while almost traditional in its authenticity of expression and directness of communication." Folk Radio

"a rich, orchestrated soundworld of rippling piano, rueful strings and the creaking of old beams." 8/10 Uncut 

New album 'Evergreen In Your Mind' 
released 📌10th April on Basin Rock 

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