The Other Side

KALANDRA

November 13, 2026

Alternative / Alternative Rock / Folk / Pop / Rock

The dream world has inspired many great works of art over the centuries. The phantasmagorical terrain inhabited by Lewis Carroll, Salvador Dali and David Lynch is where we now find Scandinavian alt-prog-folk artisans Kalandra, whose elegant blend of Nordic pop savvy and dark atmospheric rock has been a developing sensation for 15 years. Formed while the core members were studying at Paul McCartney's Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts, their remarkably assured 2020 debut album The Line - over 54 million streams and counting - was followed by 2022's immersive video game soundtrack Kingdom Two Crowns: Norse Lands. In 2024, their captivatingly majestic A Frame Of Mind album powerfully affirmed Kalandra's ascendancy - as did their sold-out headline show at Oslo's 1300-capacity Rockefeller venue earlier this year. Their proven genius for weaving ethereal melodies into raw and eerie musical landscapes makes them a perfect fit for a concept album about dreaming, as we are presented with on The Other Side. Determining the theme before writing began, the band started 'dream journalling': jotting down their nocturnal visions and working them into songs. "It's been very helpful to write down my dreams," affirms singer Katrine. "It definitely affected how I wrote lyrics. I would love to do this again, have some sort of loose concept, it brings the record together." "Knowing the theme was dreaming was helpful to me musically too," adds guitarist Florian. "We could have these dreamy effects in there. I feel most of the songs have nightmarish or dreamy parts, one way or another. There are still a lot of different themes here though, there's folklore, current events, introspective stuff, life and death... Everything can fit into dreams lyrically speaking, it's just life, it's all-encompassing." There's a very dreamlike blend of languor and disturbance taking different shapes throughout the record. Faroese singer-songwriter Elinborg lends her imploring voice to the nervous percussive tension of the uncharacteristically brisk Animal: "Kalandra have long joked about our inability to write an upbeat song," says Katrine, "so at 136 BPM, this one finally proves that we’re capable of it!". Pensive ballad A Ship Has Left The Shore especially exemplifies the album's scrupulously uncluttered soundscape, focusing purely on the strength of its haunting vocal and piano melodies. "It's about losing someone dear to you," reveals Katrine. Kalandra have long since settled into their own versatile musical identity, embracing effective contrasts between shimmering joy and aching melancholy, sounding atavistically ancient but stylishly contemporary, otherworldly but firmly rooted in woodland soil. The band have no problem sharing their hopes and ambitions for the future, and it's much the same as any blossoming band in the prime of their lives with a beautifully wrought new album in the can: bigger tours, bigger crowds, bigger budgets, bigger stages - the bigger the better for Florian. "I'll only be happy once we've done a Rammstein-sized show," he grins, "with a nuclear power plant on wheels travelling beside the bus! That's peak ambition!"