By the late 2010s, Cult Of Luna frontman Johannes Persson needed to go home. He’d lived in Stockholm since 2008, where he’d settled down and started a family, but he yearned to get back to where he grew up: the town of Umeå, a seven-hour drive north. The band’s seventh album, 2019’s A Dawn To Fear, was 80 minutes of homesick roars, and last year’s The Raging River EP was lyrically inspired by Umeå’s scenery. New album The Long Road North takes its name from Sweden’s E4 highway, which Johannes journeyed up for 400 miles to return home.
A string of guest appearances enhance the album’s frostbitten grandeur, including two turns from composer and saxophonist Colin Stetson. The Canadian has collaborated with rock royalty from Tom Waits to Arcade Fire, yet his crowning achievement is the chillingly dissonant score to Ari Aster’s , the scariest film of this generation, about a series of tragic family events set in motion by the summoning of a demon. Colin’s playing underscores the glass-gargling rage of ’s centrepiece, , before defining claustrophobic epilogue .
