There’s a strange stillness at the heart of “Deer Cross The River.” one that feels less like silence and more like memory. Norwegian musician Gunnar Kjellsby, under his one-man project Hedmark, offers not just a song but a recollection carved into sound: cold, solemn, and luminous in its weight. This is post-black metal that remembers where it came from, and refuses to let the echo fade.
The track opens like the hush before snowfall: delicate, suspended, a guitar line bending through the air as if tracing old footsteps. The sound, then, thickens. Distorted layers surge forward, not in violence but in recognition, the way frozen water might remember its flow. Kjellsby’s restraint is what gives the song its pulse; he holds back just long enough for every crash of the drums to feel like an inevitability rather than an eruption.
The vocals, shared between Kjellsby, Melina Oz, and Embla Maria O’Cadiz Gustad, don’t so much lead as haunt. Their harmonies rise and vanish like mist, spectral yet deeply human, folding the sacred and the strange into one trembling current. There’s a cinematic pull to the way their voices blend, as though calling something lost across the frozen water.
Within the noise and tremolo lies melody : clear, aching, and deliberate. The guitars shimmer with shoegaze-like melancholy while still anchoring themselves in the rawness of black metal. It’s a balance few achieve: brutality that feels tender, vastness that feels personal. Even the production walks a fine line between grit and grace, leaving enough texture to remind you this was born from real hands and real winters.
“Deer Cross The River” lingers long after it ends, not because it’s loud, but because it carries something unresolved; a story, perhaps, that the river itself refuses to release. Hedmark doesn’t just make music about cold landscapes; it makes the cold speak back; and what it says is both beautiful and unsettling, like remembering a dream that might have been real..
