Weird, Rowdy and Gloriously Unclassifiable: Twin Serpent - True Norwegian Blackgrass (Album Review) Release: 5/8/26

 

Some bands defy genre, and then some bands seem genuinely unbothered by the concept of genre altogether. Twin Serpent falls firmly into the second category, and True Norwegian Blackgrass, their sophomore record, is the sound of a band that has located its own strange frequency and decided to live there permanently, consequences be damned. Based in the Svartlamon district of Trondheim, a community that already carries its own countercultural mythology, Twin Serpent has built its identity around a collision of influences that has no business working as well as it does. Country, punk, crust, lo-fi black metal, folk, and rock and roll are all present and accounted for, blurring into something that resists easy classification while remaining immediately and viscerally engaging. Think of the ragged spiritual intensity of 16 Horsepower colliding head-on with the anarchic warmth of The Taxpayers, filtered through a sensibility that is distinctly Nordic, faintly occult, and not entirely of this world. It is a combination that could easily collapse into novelty, but Twin Serpent plays it with enough conviction and genuine craft that it never feels like a gimmick. This is simply what they sound like, and they sound like nothing else.

Where their 2022 debut Feels Like Heaven, North Of Hell drew comparisons to Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Tom Waits, both of which set high bars, True Norwegian Blackgrass feels less concerned with being measured against anyone else. The record turns the volume up, throws the throttle forward, and trusts the listener to hold on. The band's own description of a train hurtling toward derailment is entirely apt. There is a relentless, barely contained momentum running through these twelve tracks that makes the whole thing feel genuinely dangerous in the best possible sense, like something that could fly apart at any moment and somehow never does. That tension between chaos and control is one of the album's most compelling qualities, and it never lets up. The subject matter is as eclectic as the music. Over the course of the record, Twin Serpent moves between love songs and cosmic dread, windmill resistance movements, the wreckage of post-Trump America, the complexities of the porn industry, depression, conspiracy paranoia, and the particular, bone-deep isolation of spending a Norwegian winter at the bottom of a fjord that the sun has abandoned entirely. It is a lot of ground to cover in a single album, yet the band holds it together through sheer personality and energy. Each topic receives the same wide-eyed, slightly feverish treatment that makes even the heaviest subject matter feel alive and urgent rather than suffocating. 

There is real wit running through this record alongside the darkness, and that balance is harder to strike than it sounds. Lead single Stellar Suicide arrives and sets the tone with precision, a raw, jubilant piece of cow punk that carries the instinctive dancefloor pull of classic country while concealing something stranger just beneath the surface. The song takes a genuine astronomical event, the unexplained disappearance of a star that baffled the scientific community, and reframes it as a love story. The lightness of the arrangement makes the underlying cosmic unease all the more effective, and the result is cheerful, slightly unsettling, and immediately memorable. It is the band in miniature, playful on the surface, deeper than it first appears. Hundromshelvete, delivered entirely in Norwegian, travels somewhere louder and more turbulent. The title is a wordplay connecting a traditional wooden boat from Northern Norway to the concept of hell itself, and the song earns that duality completely. Twangy and driving, with guitars that spiral outward in directions recalling The Mars Volta before snapping back into a fierce crust-country finale, it functions as both a tribute to the far north and a reckoning with what perpetual darkness and geographic isolation do to a person's interior world. It is one of the most fully realized pieces on the record and a strong argument for the band's ability to go well beyond surface-level genre blending.

The four-piece lineup is central to everything that works here. Timo Silvola and Hanna Fauske share vocal duties throughout, their voices dueling and harmonizing in ways that provide much of the album's emotional range, which is tender in places, feral in others, and occasionally both within the same breath. Silvola's banjo and acoustic guitar anchor the country and folk elements while Tony Gonzalez's electric guitar introduces the noise, the feedback, and the occasional flash of genuine menace. Viktor Kristensen's drumming drives the whole thing forward with a percussive urgency that keeps even the most expansive moments feeling grounded and purposeful. These four people sound like a band in the truest sense as a unit with shared instincts and a collective personality that comes through in every track. 

Recorded at Piir Studio, just minutes from the band's home in Svartlamon during the year of the serpent, the album was captured over a hot summer week by engineer Vebjørn Svanberg Numme. The production is lo-fi in spirit without being careless in execution. There is genuine warmth in the sound, and the dynamic swings between acoustic intimacy and full amp-wall assault feel earned rather than jarring. A track sung in Finnish adds another dimension, a personal nod to Silvola's roots that reinforces the sense of a band drawing freely from wherever it needs to. True Norwegian Blackgrass is weird, rowdy, a little bit black metal, and entirely its own creation. In a landscape crowded with bands chasing sounds that already exist, Twin Serpent are doing something genuinely singular and doing it with enough heart, humor, and barely restrained ferocity to make you very glad they are.

Check out the official music video for their single Stellar Suicide:

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