Whenever she’s anxious or stressed, Katrine Stenbekk has the same dream. The Norwegian vocalist is paralysed as she feels her bedsheets being pulled away from her; she then floats out the window and hears the voices of female relatives both living and dead, urging her to join them somewhere she can’t see. “I’ve started to call out my own name in my sleep, to pull me back,” she says, “because I’m not ready to know where this dream is going [to take me].”
Her recurring vision was the inspiration for Descend The Stars, a standout moment on her folk-prog band Kalandra’s magnificent new third album, The Other Side. ‘As daylight sings its final song… the tide of sleep is calling me,’ Stenbekk unloads over classical swells from the track’s guest performers, chamber-poppers Árstíðir. ‘It’s whispering my name.’
“I feel like it’s a nightmare more than a dream,” she continues, talking to Hammer by video-call on a dreary October afternoon. “I tell myself ‘this doesn’t have to be a bad thing’ and then I’m off flying, but deep down, I am scared. I also have mimics that often show up between 4 and 6am: voices that say my name. You know it’s happening in your head, but sometimes you wonder, ‘Is this in my head? What if someone is calling me?’”
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It’s no surprise, then, that Stenbekk walked into a band meeting in 2024 and said that whatever they make next should be centred around sleep and the subconscious. Two years later, The Other Side is their first conceptual work: single Let Me Be Open is about overcoming deeply latent fears, while the shamanic yet catchy Animal asks whether generative AI technologies are able to dream. But the album also expands upon the quartet’s blend of folk tradition and modern rock, which has made them one of the most promising newcomers in alternative music.
Although Kalandra started in 2011, their career didn’t truly kick off until eight years later, when they inked a deal with By Norse: the label co-founded by Einar Selvik of Nordic resurrectionists Wardruna. On their 2020 debut, The Line, Stenbekk howled like a priestess over tunes which packed the awe of ancient forest rituals into contemporary song structures.
Where 2024 successor A Frame Of Mind realised the band’s anthemic potential, The Other Side is blurrier: less immediate but ultimately more rewarding as it coalesces sounds from across the continents. Midpoint A Ship Has Left The Shore rises from Western singer/songwriter-style intimacy to a cleansing, choral chant.
“The genesis of the band was us being this folky thing, but none of us are folk musicians,” explains guitarist Jogeir Daae Mæland. “It’s us doing a pastiche of all these different genres where we kind of know what we’re doing.”
“There are influences of folk from the Nordic countries, but also from all over the world,” adds Stenbekk. “I have hints of Indian and Middle Eastern things that I do with my voice.”
The lineup seem like opposites: Stenbekk is the chatty, elfin dreamer, whereas Mæland, co-guitarist Florian Winter and drummer Oskar Johnsen Rydh (all also on today’s call) are stoic, sometimes deadpan. Rydh barely says a word. But what brought them together was a shared desire to push limits. The singer and guitarists met while studying at the Liverpool Institute For Performing Arts (LIPA), the university co-founded by local hero Paul McCartney.
“I remember the day I did the auditions,” says Winter. “I had never heard of LIPA and wasn’t particularly a fan of the Beatles, but going into that audition, I said, ‘This has been my dream forever! I’m such a Beatles fan!’ It was all BS.”
The trio only met McCartney once, at their graduation ceremony, where he gave out the diplomas. “Time stops in that moment,” Stenbekk recalls. “It literally takes five seconds: you go out, you hold the paper and you smile at the camera. He said, ‘Take the pin badge.’ ‘What?’ ‘Take the pin badge, love – in my hand. Now look at the camera!’ I just glided off the stage and was like, ‘Oh!’ My heart was racing a lot faster than I thought it would.”
“When you go to LIPA, you sign away all the rights you have to them taking pictures of you,” adds Winter. “If they take a photo of you at the university, they can use that in all of their promotional materials, forever. I saw this in Oslo: they were having tryouts, and there was a life-sized cardboard cutout of me outside the building, in the middle of the street.”
From there, Stenbekk jokes, much of Kalandra’s career progression has come down to “stalking” their idols. The singer sent By Norse’s Selvik demos and music videos for four years, then it was another two before his label actually reached out with an offer.
Similarly, she once outright told composer Bear McCreary (The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power, God Of War, Percy Jackson And The Olympians) at a festival that she thought she’d be perfect for one of his projects. She’s now lined up to sing on his soundtrack for AAA title God Of War Laufey next year.
“It’s just about telling people in your genre that you exist,” she explains. “None of us have musician parents: we can’t leap off of someone else’s career. We really had to start from scratch, so we can’t have any shame about this. I’m quite introverted, but I know for a fact that if I don’t do anything, nothing is going to happen. So I need to dare to be social.”
That self-determination is paying off. As well as being signed to By Norse and their frontwoman having God Of War Laufey on the horizon, the band composed music for strategy game Kingdom Two Crowns in 2022 and have toured extensively. Songs from The Line alone have been streamed more than 50 million times combined.
But, when Hammer asks about the members’ hopes for the future, more of this kind of thing isn’t what they talk about. They want to carry on doing what brought them together: smashing different cultures together, and smashing genre conventions over their knees. “There are a lot of things that we didn’t get to do on the last two albums: we never got to work with an orchestra,” Winter hints.
On a more personal level, Stenbekk wants to work on keeping the bad dreams at bay, to control how stress infects her subconscious. “It’s like a black tar that seeps into my soul,” she states, “and I don’t know how to relax. I still feel like I can’t get it out unless I allow myself to cry, or I go for a run. Maybe I should start boxing or punching something – I really feel like I should handle stress better.”
The Other Side is out on November 13 via By Norse. Kalandra tour Europe and the UK from February to March. Get tickets.
