Iceland’s fertile music scene has birthed another exciting group, Kontinuum, which will issue its latest effort, No Need to Reason on 6 July via Season of Mist. It seems appropriate that the band is teasing the new release with a tune called “Shivers”, as that’s exactly what it inspires in the listener from the first measure. With haunting guitar figures that recall post-rock and six-string beds that wouldn’t be out of place in the melodic hard rock coming out of Sweden in decades past, Kontinuum has crafted a song that is at once as infectious as any pop song and as uncompromising as metal at its most extreme. Let’s not forget the equally haunting and mysterious vocals that drive the song to victory, which account for at least some of Kontinuum’s mainstream radio success in its homeland.
No Need to Reason is the band’s third album, which the members see as a continuation of the 2015 effort Kyrr and its self-described “intelligent dark music”, pointing out that, “Like the blue ice, black beaches and other spectacular landscapes of our North Atlantic home, No Need to Reason keeps changing and shifting, while we seem to keep an underlying epic and mythical theme”.
Of the track “Shivers” in particular, the band says, “It’s a long running river. It’s been with us since the days of Kyrr, ever evolving as our soundscape matured, finding its passages through our musical spectrum until it finally reached its resting place on No Need to Reason. ‘Shivers’ is the perfect link between the worlds of our old and new and serves as a starting point of our journey into No Need to Reason“.
Having garnered more than its share of critical accolades since forming in 2010, Kontinuum continues its own trend of creating forward-thinking music in 2018 via No Need to Reason, an album that could very well stand as the outfit’s best to date.