EIVØR, JOHN LUNN AND DANNY SAUL

NEW ALBUM:

’THE LAST KINGDOM - DESTINY IS ALL’

OUT NOW ON DIGITAL & CD FORMATS

STREAM HERE

NEW VIDEO FOR ‘THE LAST KINGDOM - SLIGHT RETURN’ STREAMING HERE

PRESS IMAGES HERE

RECORD STORE DAY VINYL RELEASE - APRIL 22

MUSIC WRITTEN FOR AND INSPIRED BY HIT NETFLIX SERIES THE LAST KINGDOM

AND MOVIE SEVEN KINGS MUST DIE

Faroese electronic artist/throat singer and double Icelandic Music Prize winner Eivør, Emmy winner & Ivor Novello/BAFTA nominee John Lunn and composer Danny Saul (Shetland, Jamestown) today release new album ‘The Last Kingdom - Destiny Is All’, featuring music created for and inspired by hit Netflix show The Last Kingdom (produced by Carnival Films, and one of the Top 20 Most Globally Streamed Series - with 10.4 billion streams - whose soundtracks have also been streamed over 22 million times to date). The new album - which will also receive a Record Store Day vinyl release on April 22 - is comprised of music created for the soundtracks of the fourth and fifth seasons of The Last Kingdom, as well as new material from new feature film Seven Kings Must Die (also produced by Carnival Films), released last week and charting #1 on Netflix in over 40 countries. The album arrives today alongside a new video for ‘The Last Kingdom - Slight Return’, recorded live at London’s Hammersmith Apollo - watch that here, and stream ‘Destiny Is All’ in full from here.

When John Lunn and Eivør first began working together back in 2015, they quickly discovered the kind of chemistry that leads to rarefied magic. Chosen to create the soundtrack to The Last Kingdom - a wildly popular series set in Viking-ravaged 9th century England - the two musicians soon dreamed up a darkly hypnotic sound that draws from the vast imagination and sophisticated musicianship Lunn has brought to his scoring work, and the otherworldly vocals and genre-warping artistry Eivør has infused into her nine acclaimed albums. In a continuation of their musical partnership, Lunn, Eivør & Saul now deliver their most elaborately realised output yet—a full-length project expanding on their work for The Last Kingdom, resulting in an immersive album that inhabits a strangely enchanted world all its own.

Lunn, Saul, and Eivør’s collaboration has continually defied sonic convention; “On the show there’s a lot of epic battles and other moments you’d normally associate with orchestral music, but I wanted to do something new and different and focus on electronic instruments,” says Lunn. “I was looking for something to accompany that and saw a video of Eivør and her extraordinary throat singing, and she completely captured the energy that The Last Kingdom required.” An artist who’s endlessly mined inspiration from the dramatic landscape of her Nordic homeland—and who’s earned comparison to Kate Bush in the pages of MOJO—Eivør felt an immediate affinity for the source material. “Growing up in the Faroe Islands, I was always fascinated with the Vikings, so the series feels very close to my heart,” says Eivør, who also recently featured on the God of War Ragnarök score and on the soundtrack to the hit video game. “It felt so natural to fit my singing into what John had come up with, and many of the lyrics I ended up writing were inspired by the old Nordic sagas that imprinted on me as a child.”

This dynamic is captured on album-opener ‘The Beloveds’, a slow-building yet frenetic track that encapsulates the moody intensity of ‘Destiny Is All’. It soundtracks a highly charged opening scene in Season Five of The Last Kingdom, during which Eivør and Saul make cameos, leading the chants with her famous Nordic drum.‘The Beloveds’ centres on Eivør’s ominously chanted vocals, an element informed by her roots in Faroese folk music. “Those chants are very much a big part of my culture; it’s something I remember hearing my grandfather doing when I was younger,” she says.

Eivør’s modern electronica and throat singing has long been deeply informed by the brutal beauty of the Faroes, since growing up on one of the northerly islands, surrounded by the windswept North Atlantic. She immersed herself in music from 13, fronting a trip-hop band after discovering albums by Massive Attack and Portishead. The winner of the 2022 Nordic Council Music Prize (which has been previously won by Björk), Eivør is part of a new wave of Nordic artists (alongside the likes of Wardruna and Heilung) rapidly building passionate international fan bases with music that honours their ancient cultural & musical folklore. At last count, Eivør’s music has been streamed over 93 million times.

Although Lunn and Saul mostly worked with analog synths in sculpting the musical foundation to ‘Destiny Is All’, they also experimented with such instruments as the kantele (a zither-like object used in traditional Finnish music) and the double bass (an instrument Lunn processed with distortion pedals to generate a particularly ferocious sound). Throughout, Lunn, Saul, and Eivør have followed their most experimental impulses and adorned their songs with unexpected details, such as the jazz-like textures and gorgeously eerie beats of ‘Blues For Halig’.

“This project has changed my approach to my music, and reconnected me with certain parts of myself that I may have left behind at some point,” says Eivør, who’s also incorporated songs from Destiny Is All into her live set. “I hope that the album helps The Last Kingdom come even more alive in the minds of people who love the series. I hope that in its own way, it can become part of the soundtrack to their lives.” Lunn, meanwhile, adds; "The Last Kingdom score IS Eivør, without Eivør there would be no unique score”.

The Last Kingdom (Netflix #1) and Eivør (93m streams) - new soundtrack album + video out now

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