Gunerius & Verdensveven // Hade livet!

Gunerius & Verdensveven make party music for unstable times on Hade livet!, a ten-track set that keeps slipping its own frame just as soon as a groove takes hold. Picking up from 2024’s Fantasmagor’i, the Norwegian trio move freely between dance-punk, free jazz, soul, krautrock, bossa nova, and pop, but the record’s real identity comes from the friction between those languages rather than any tidy fusion. Thomas Gunerius Bergsten’s microtonal guitars sit beside drum machines, mellotron, guembri, electric sitar, balafon, samplers, and homemade instruments, while Magnus Tveten and Alexander Lindbäck give the music a rhythm section sturdy enough to absorb every detour. The result is psychedelic in the old sense of the word: not decorative, but destabilizing, playful, and slightly off-center. That tension comes into sharpest focus on “Granateple,” where Signe Marie Rustad joins the band for a mournful protest song that turns hopelessness into something communal rather than merely bleak. Saxophonist Arnfinn Langesæter appears on “Love Everywhere,” adding another color to an album already built from unlikely combinations. Mixed and co-produced by Ryan McPhun, Hade livet! balances scrappy invention with a surprising sense of control. Even at its strangest, there is a physicality to the record, a sense that experimentation matters most when it can still move a room. For all its talk of darkness, collapse, and being outside, the record never loses its appetite for movement. Gunerius & Verdensveven have made an album that treats the dance floor less as an escape than as a place to stay awake together.