Nina Kinert released RELIGIOUS last year; an album telling personal stories about growing up within the Pentecostal Church Community in Sweden. Her new LP CHORALS is a continuation of RELIGIOUS and is billed as “an experiment revolving around voice and death” recorded in close collaboration with Anton Sundell and Daniel Fagge Fagerström. It’s beautiful, and if you’re interested in hearing more about Nina’s experiences and the recording progress, be sure to check my interview with her from last year.
“These days I feel somewhat in control of what I choose to believe”
Nina Kinert released the album Romantic and the EP In Twos in 2018 and was awarded Composer of the year at the Independent Manifest gala in Sweden that same year. Her new album Religious – her first release since 2021’s Wild, Wild Geese – tells personal stories about growing up within the Pentecostal Church Community in Sweden, while simultaneously exploring her attraction to both nature and the supernatural.
Romantic was my album of the year in 2018, and still affects how I search for new music today. I’m pretty much always on the lookout for ‘the next Nina’; to discover an artist about whom I was previously unaware, but that goes on to have a huge significance in my life. So to say I was happy that she agreed to an interview is somewhat of an understatement.
Religious tells stories about you growing up in the Pentecostal Church, and also explores your attraction to spiritual mystique and the supernatural. Were these attractions you felt as a child, or did they come later?
I’ve always felt open to different possibilities, and maybe seen that as a result of my childhood within the church. As if it gave me an understanding of belief – no matter what the belief relies on. But when I was a child I thought everything needed to be categorised, divided into good or evil. That’s not how I see it now.
I love Nina Kinert. Her 2018 album Romantic and In Twos EP from the same year are releases I return to frequently, but she’s been relatively quiet since then, averaging about a single a year in the intervening years. So I was very excited to get stuck into her new album Religious, which explores some of her stories about growing up within the Pentecostal Church Community in Sweden , while at the same time dealing with her “attraction to spiritual mystique and the supernatural.” As with most of her work, Marble Armour is hauntingly beautiful, and a great entry point into her often electronically inflected, folk-led musical world if she’s escaped your attention until now.
In her poem Wild Geese, Mary Oliver explores what one must do in order to lead a good life. In it the speaker talks directly to her reader, imploring them to not worry so much about being good; rather, the reader should be true to nature and the beauty found in it. As someone who holds the natural world in similarly high regard, it’s fertile inspirational ground for Nina Kinert, who describes her own feeling while reading the poem as “a sort of wanderlust, travelling of the mind in a time when we all need to stay put to stay safe.” The result is a brief but beautiful ballad which not only has the heartbreakingly poignant piano you’d expect, but a pan flute, which adds further a further atmospheric layer to a hauntingly lovely piece of music.
Kicking this off with one of my favourite records from the last couple of years. Definitely should have got way more attention that it did. Just amazingly beautiful.
The Predatory Wasp 