Weird Music Wednesday: “Chant” by HÉR
A rewarding dive for those who find comfort in the shadows
When discussing a band as conceptually fluid as HÉR, their 2026 release Monochrome feels like a curated soundscape for a ritual you weren’t entirely sure you were invited to. Emerging from Gdańsk but spiritually rooted in the freezing soil of 11th-century Iceland, the band has evolved from their experimental jazz roots into something much more primal and “Nordic.” Hardly the stuff for your “Summer BBQ” playlist, unless your “BBQ” involves animal masks and standing around a bonfire in the Baltic rain.
In their earlier iterations, the band flirted with the boundaries of free jazz and atmospheric world music. However, Monochrome represents a deliberate shedding of excess—a move toward what they call “the essence of participating.” While earlier works felt like watching a complex machine from a safe distance, this record demands you stand in the room while the machine is being built. The evolution here is one of stripping away the “performance” and replacing it with “presence,” trading the polish of a studio band for the raw, throat-singing intensity of a tribe in a cave.
If we are looking for the “weirdest” moment on an album that already includes a song about a literal slipknot and another inspired by Old Norse wisdom poetry, the nod must go to the opening track, “Chant.” It is a ten-minute-plus gauntlet of meditative immersion that defies almost every rule of modern album sequencing. Most bands open with a “hook”; HÉR decided to open Monochrome with a low-frequency hum and throat singing that essentially tells the listener: “If you can’t handle this sustained, earth-bound vibration, you might as well turn back now.” Starting an album with a ten-minute ritualistic drone is the musical equivalent of greeting a dinner guest by staring at them in total silence for half an hour before offering them a glass of wine… Cheers!
The Song
Spotify:
Apple Music: https://music.apple.com/us/song/chant/1846153523
The Album
Spotify:
Apple Music: https://music.apple.com/us/album/monochrome/1846153515