**I WAS A KING | FOLLOW ME HOME | COASTAL TOWN RECORDINGS | OCT. 28, 2022**

Bio:

The front cover art for Follow Me Home, the ninth album by Oslo, Norway’s I Was A King (Coastal Town Recordings, Oct. 28) displays dotted lines that correspond to colorful cutouts on the back cover, one for each of the album’s twelve songs.

This is an innocent, childlike prompt to play it like a puzzle, literally, but on a more figurative note, this bit of fun also feels like a suggestion to fill in the blanks on what these songs mean to the listener.

Album opener “All This Time” is a just shy of two-minute prologue, foreshadowing the bits of melancholy carried throughout the album, fully realized on the following cut “Down.”

Gentle whispers

from the ground

You’re awake

but you’re still dreaming of the sound

When the shadow calls

breathing down your neck

Awaiting a response

The feelings these lyrics evoke are moving, delivered with the insistent, singular-sounding combined voices of the band’s co-writers Frode Strømstad and Anne Lise Frøkedal, and bringing about that deep understanding of shared human condition that, even when packaged in the few minutes of a pop-rock song, is powerful enough to move mountains (and navigate fjords!)

In the case of I Was A King, the band has been around long enough to navigate without a map. Follow Me Home is clearly the sound of hard-won confidence.

Formed by Strømstad in 2006, with its debut album released in 2007, I Was A King continued at a steady pace for the next seven years, appearing on almost as many record labels throughout. Some may say the band’s sound went through just as many iterations during this time.

2009’s self-titled sophomore album featured contributions from Sufjan Stevens and Gary Olson of The Ladybug Transistor (on the Follow Me Home single “Growing Wild” you’ll be reminded of Sufjan’s banjo flourishes mixed with the opening notes of a Sonic Youth tune.)

2010’s Old Friends brought elements of Big Star and The Stooges into the mix and in 2012 indie rock icons Robyn Hitchcock and Norman Blake (of Teenage Fanclub) came on board to co-produce and perform on the band’s major label debut You Love It Here.

Following 2014’s Isle of Yours, I Was A King finally took a respite before returning for 2018’s Slow Century. 2020’s Grand Hotel followed.

2022’s Follow Me Home is perfectly titled. The album feels like kicking up your feet in front of the fire after a long journey that was trying, but filled with experience.

In reality, that warm fire would have likely been welcomed during the Follow Me Home recording sessions.

“We recorded Follow Me Home in December of 2021 in a building that had been a very important hub for Norwegian music over the last 20 years,” Strømstad explains. “While we were making the album, the building was emptied, and the heat and water shut off. It has since been demolished.”

Even under these considerably less-than-ideal circumstances, Strømstad and Frøkedal managed to make another reality of the time – producing these recordings during a lockdown – work to their advantage. The minimal take on the sound that I Was A King had been traveling towards all this time is its strongest asset on Follow Me Home.

“The previous two records were very band-oriented,” Strømstad says. “We felt that doing it as a two-piece this time would be a fresh approach, playing instruments we normally don’t play just to get some different ideas and textures and keeping it as simple and organic as possible.”

With Follow Me Home, Strømstad and Frøkedal had to fill in the blank spots in their process, just like the art that adorns the album cover. When the audience places the pieces, a colorful image emerges.

Follow Me Home, the ninth album by Oslo, Norway’s I Was A King, arrives on Oct. 28, 2022 via the band’s own label Coastal Town Recordings.