Heilung – Anoana
2022
252K Likes
Best comments
1.“I don't always listen to Heilung, but when I do... SO DO THE NEIGHBOURS!”
More comments
- 2.“I don't want to sit at a desk and stare at Excel spreadsheets eight hours a day for forty to fifty years. I want whatever the fuck this is.”
- 3.“My wife insisted on listening to this on loop during her labor. We now have our 4-day-old son, Leif. Life is good.”
The story
Heilung is German for healing, and the band calls its music amplified history from early medieval northern Europe. They formed in Copenhagen in 2014 with members from Denmark, Norway and Germany, and they work from Iron Age and Viking Age texts and rune inscriptions. The instruments are not from Guitar Center: human bones, a drum of horse skin painted with human blood, a clay rattle filled with human ashes. Their music turned up in season six of Vikings.
Anoana was the first song from their third album, Drif, released in August 2022, which went top ten in Germany. Most of the words come from bracteates, gold pendants made across Northern Europe some 1,500 years ago, mostly out of Roman gold handed to North Germanic tribes to keep the peace. People likely wore them for protection, wishes or fortune-telling, and the band treats the inscriptions as coded spells. Their point: back then the North was swimming in gold, so maybe the Dark Ages weren't so dark. They even mastered the album at a lower volume than most modern records to get more dynamic range.
The video, made by Helmet Films & Visual Effects, has serious Midsommar energy. A girl in twig antlers in a forest glade. Singer Maria Franz rising out of the sea in white robes. A body-painted woman giving birth in a cave while worshippers gather around a bonfire. Fifteen-hundred-year-old spells read off coins, and the real treasure turns out to be a baby.
