Soijl is the name of a project founded by Swedish multi-instrumentalist Mattias Svensson, whose past musical involvements have included the likes of Saturnus, Istapp, Vanmakt, and Nidrike. On Soijl’s debut album, Endless Elysian Fields, Svensson is joined by Henrik Kindvall of Skald (ex-Nidrike), who wrote the lyrics and provided the vocals. What the two of them have achieved is a powerful and moving work that’s enormously heavy, beautifully atmospheric, and emotionally devastating — and today we give you the chance to hear the entire album in advance of its September 21 release by Solitude Productions.

On the seven tracks included on the album, Svensson has crafted music that’s achingly anguished, each song built upon a bedrock of huge, moaning doom riffs from which tendrils of bereft guitar melody spiral upward like smoke from the dying embers of a funeral pyre. The songs are usually slow and majestic, spreading a heavy mantle of despair and heartache in their wake. Those calamitous bedrock riffs are dire enough to drag you bodily into a sinkhole of grief, but the lead guitar melodies are sublime, often ethereal, and even transcendent in their cold, alabaster purity. Continue reading »