Ane Brun - How Beauty Holds the Hand of Sorrow (Balloon Ranger)
Add Date: 12/08/2020
Focus Tracks: Closer, Song for Thrill and Tom, & Lose My Way
FCC: Clean
Formats: Chill, Electronic, NACC Top 200, Submodern, & Triple A
Artist Info: Though Ane Brun has been kept busy the last few years by the release of multiple of songs and albums, those who follow her more closely will have noticed something unusual about the always productive, ever innovative artist’s work: she’s not released a collection of new original music since 2015’s acclaimed When I’m Free, which took her to the top of the charts both in her native Norway and her adopted homeland of Sweden.
That all changed when After the Great Storm was announced for October 30, 2020, and it arrived with a second revelation: another album, How Beauty Holds the Hand of Sorrow, would follow just a month later, on November 27, 2020. What remained under wraps, though, was just how dramatically different the two records would be from one another. In confident opposition to its immediate predecessor, her ninth album offers without doubt some of the most stark, tender and palliative songs of her entire two-decade career. The long wait, in other words, has been doubly worth it.
With eighteen such tracks united by common themes, Brun’s original intention was for a double album, but, as lockdown kicked in, spare time imposed by the pandemic led her to reassess this concept. So, while she and her team administered final touches remotely, she added one last song, before separating the recordings into two collections, distinguished by contrasting moods. Both, of course, are quintessentially Brun, but the more upbeat After the Great Storm – which finds her in questing mode, drawing upon her experiences both in performance and in collaboration, her crystal-clear, affecting voice haunted by electronic and analogue textures – will delight those who’ve tracked her constant stylistic reinventions. How Beauty Holds the Hand of Sorrow, on the other hand – though it, too, explores fresh techniques and styles – will be more familiar to those who recall Brun as the emotional, guitar-picking singer-songwriter who emerged at the turn of the century.
Of her decision to focus How Beauty Holds the Hand of Sorrow on her quiet, distinctive brand of poignancy, Brun explains that “when it comes to slower, softer, more melancholic music, I love listening to albums or playlists that put me in a specific mood just by offering me a good 45 minutes of that ‘cool down’ state of mind. These are the albums that I tend to put on repeat, like Sufjan Stevens’ Carrie & Lowell or Nils Frahms’ Screws.”