Kristian Matsson Stops Avoiding the Music of Dalarna

Kristian Matsson began the next Tallest Man on Earth album by returning to Dalarna. Just Beyond Endless Mountain arrives through ANTI- on 9 October and contains eleven songs. He says the record was inspired by the traditional music of the Swedish region where he grew up and now lives again.

Matsson's earlier rejection of that inheritance sharpens the account. Somewhere along the way, he says, he developed an immature aversion to the culture he had grown up around. Back in Dalarna, he began reading about its music and how people had lived. The album starts where nostalgia usually tries to finish the work with scenery alone.

Dalarna is more specific than a general wash of Swedish folk colour. Regional archives hold early folk recordings, handwritten tunes and filmed dances; the polska survives through the playing and dancing practices of particular communities. Matsson has not yet explained which rhythms or melodic forms entered the record. It is therefore more accurate to hear a changed relationship with place than to declare the album a completed study in folk tradition.

The clearest musical evidence so far is Deliver Me From Trying. Its video was shot in the Swedish countryside, while the recording retains what already makes Matsson recognisable: the high, grainy voice and guitar playing that pushes each phrase instead of merely accompanying it. He has not suddenly dressed himself as a traditional musician. The change is that this familiar voice no longer pretends to have arrived from nowhere.

A homecoming album can use geography as a convenient headline. Matsson describes the harder act of returning to read what he once chose to avoid. If Just Beyond Endless Mountain sustains that work across all eleven songs, Dalarna will not sit behind the singer as scenery. It will help explain why he sings in precisely this way.