Sólstafir’s Endless Twilight Of Codependent Love: a post-metal snowstorm to get lost in

Icelandic enigmas Sólstafir fuse the intimate and the epic on new album Endless Twilight Of Codependent Love

Solstafir Endless Twilight Of Codependent Love
(Image: © Season Of Mist)

You can trust Louder Our experienced team has worked for some of the biggest brands in music. From testing headphones to reviewing albums, our experts aim to create reviews you can trust. Find out more about how we review.

Sólstafir’s music doesn’t feel like it’s been written so much as carved out of the landscape by blizzards and howling gales. The Reykjavík quartet’s seventh album is no exception. It’s as elemental and unknowable as modern metal gets.

In that respect, it’s business as usual. But in others, it’s a step on from anything they’ve done before. Sólstafir have never been short of scope and ambition, but Endless Twilight Of Codependent Love – how's that for a title, their first English-language one in 15 years? – is the sound of a band subtly but distinctly changing things up.

Endless… is a hefty record, its nine songs unfolding over more than an hour. The opening one-two of Akerri and Drysill clock in at almost 20 minutes between them. The former is a shapeshifting prog metal epic that’s as disorientating as being lost in a snowstorm. The latter is a slab of glacial Nordic goth whose spiralling guitars are underpinned by glassy, post-punk synths (Sólstafir are masters of making not very much sound like a hell of a lot). Both are equally powerful, in completely different ways.

That streak of restlessness runs through Endless…. Where past albums have each had a recognisable but distinct topography, this time they’ve thrown all the pieces in the air and let the wind carry them wherever. Til Moldar is a warm ballad that billows like blood in a spring pool, while the controlled savagery of Dionysus is an explicit callback to their black metal roots. Most startling of all is Or, which starts off as a lounge-jazz workout before someone opens the door and a force-ten gale starts blowing in..

The fixed point throughout is frontman Aðalbjörn ‘Addi’ Tryggvason, whose wounded-animal moan offers something to cling on. The fact he’s mostly singing in Icelandic only deepens the enigma; ironically, the English-language Her Fall From Grace is the least intriguing thing here lyrically. But even when they’re stripping away a layer of mystery, Sólstafir sound like no one else out there. and Endless Twilight Of Codependent Love is an album to get lost in, in every sense.


Dave Everley

Dave Everley has been writing about and occasionally humming along to music since the early 90s. During that time, he has been Deputy Editor on Kerrang! and Classic Rock, Associate Editor on Q magazine and staff writer/tea boy on Raw, not necessarily in that order. He has written for Metal Hammer, Louder, Prog, the Observer, Select, Mojo, the Evening Standard and the totally legendary Ultrakill. He is still waiting for Billy Gibbons to send him a bottle of hot sauce he was promised several years ago.