All Change!

It was, perhaps, inevitable that VOLA would do something unexpected in 2021. When they rose to fame in 2016 it was their disparate mix of heavy-bottomed djent riffs and luscious melodies seemingly inspired by the New Romantic era that caught people’s attention. The Danish-Swedish outfit injected their soulful arrangements with modern progressive heaviness in ways that had not quite been done before and as a result their debut album, Inmazes, offered up something rare, memorable and exceptional. When fans wanted more of the same two years later, they dropped a record that side-stepped the familiar staccato crunch of their debut in favour of soft balladry, pop-electronica and keyboard-heavy passages. Those mechanical djent sounds – perpetuated by the likes of Meshuggah and TesseracT – made a cameo but were no longer VOLA’s bedrock; they were treading a different path with their follow-up, Applause Of A Distant Crowd.

“Sometimes we go to the rock scene as well,” says frontman Asger Mygind about their second album, fully recognising the deviation from their metallic start. Fast-forward to 2021 and VOLA