Nadja The Stone Is Not Hit By The Sun, Nor Carved With A Knife

Oh Nadja, how magnificent are thee. Never ceasing to amaze, never compromising to any trend, always leader, never follower. We love you Nadja!

Aidan Baker (guitars, vocals, drum machine) and Leah Buckareff (bass guitar), AKA Nadja – now return on November 4th with The Stone Is Not Hit By The Sun, Nor Carved With A Knife – their first release for Gizeh Records, and yet another incredibly mesmerizing chapter in this band’s now unbelievable discography. The Canadian/Berlin-based ambient doom duo of Aidan Baker and Leah Buckareff continue their ultra-prolific output with a monolithic record which explores the depths of heavy noisescape-related music, continuing down the path opened with Dagdrøm and developed further with the unbelievable Queller. Encompassing distorted riffs and hypnotic rhythms, the album sonically attempts to continue on from the more structured elements of the duo’s recent album – the aforementioned monumental Queller – coupling that approach with Nadja’s more traditional sprawling, dense and challenging sounds. The relentless fuzzed-out textures repeat and build into a blissful and cathartic whole; a place to be completely immersed. In the deep, glacial and all-consuming world that Baker and Buckareff provide us with here, there is a will to dissolve, to let the record wash right over you – or perhaps even through you.

At times crushingly beautiful, The Stone Is Not Hit By The Sun, Nor Carved With A Knife is brought to life by its clever restraints with quieter interludes serving a perfect purpose against its more intense, heavier moments, which overall are just simply massive in their almost otherworldly heaviness. The album’s intriguing title comes from a runic inscription on an Icelandic burial stone, but the phrase also appears on the Eggja Stone, which provided some of the lyrical content on the record. Nadja have a habit of transcending genres, and indeed throughout their career they have been incredibly difficult to pin down. The Stone Is Not Hit By The Sun, Nor Carved With A Knife is a welcome addition to that hefty catalogue and stands up tall against their most impressive work, and represents one of the heaviest and most intriguing doom-metal, industrial, drone and shoegaze releases of the year. The album was recorded by the band in autumn 2015 at their own Broken Spine Studios, Berlin, mastered by James Plotkin, and comes with artwork by Aidan Baker himself collaborating with Richard Knox.

01. The Stone 22:13
02. The Sun 35:02
03. A Knife 22:41