059 :: SPRUNG

Featuring

"Adrenaline" by GB, from Herzsprung, released by AD 93 in 2026. Listen / Buy direct

Transcript

This song, in my mind, is like a poem or a dream, evoking feelings in us in a way that defies all logic and yet nonetheless seems viscerally true.

This is evident even before we hear any lyrics, as the song opens with this lyrical guitar riff that sets our mind spinning before it is punctuated by this eerie string hit. And when the vocals do enter, they are almost the mirror image of the instrumentation: matter of fact, pedestrian, barely sung. But in these contrasts and combinations, the song becomes something singular, expressive because it isn't what we expect.

That's why I say it's like a poem or a dream. It feels like it gets its power precisely from rearranging the ordinary elements of language and sound into something strange and new. We recognize the individual words and notes, but together everything is slightly askew, and that makes it all hit differently.

Sometimes it's these little turns of phrase, like "biggest nothing yet", which makes no literal sense but reverberates deeply with all its possible connotations. And other times it's these sequences of words that should have no business being in a song at all. But here's the thing: now that I've heard them in a song, they seem in no way out of place, possessing an evocative power I never knew them to have, which the artist has revealed.

And there's a poetry to the song's musical arrangement as well, the way it stacks together timbres and shifts between moods and finds these unexpected but perfect additions, like this single note on a violin.

Another way to put my point is that this is a song that follows the artist's intuition, not worrying if all its moves make sense, just that they feel right. And listening to this song is to be pulled along with that intuition, brought in whatever direction it leads. It is to experience a music that is free to roam, unburdened by the usual rules and conventions, and, dare I say, more pure. Because it's like this song, in making its own language, is able to speak to us directly, and just let us feel its sound, in all its resonances and reverberations, this little poem of sonic possibilities.

Liner Notes

GB is Danish artist Gustav Berntsen.

The Simpsons season 6 is indeed an excellent season, featuring such classic episodes as "Bart of Darkness" and "Who Shot Mr. Burns?".