Folk & World
Heilung released “Seidh” on Wednesday, the second single from “Sagas”, which Season of Mist puts out on 11 December. Like the rest of the album, it comes from the music Kai Uwe Faust, Maria Franz and Christopher Juul recorded with games studio Ninja Theory for the video game “Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II”, and it isn’t entirely new: the band performed it live at The Game Awards in 2023.
The song centres on the völva, the seeress of Norse mythology who, through chant, rhythm and altered states of consciousness, opens a space where the unseen begins to speak. It’s the mythology that guides the game’s Senua through 9th-century Iceland.
The video, directed by Gornoss, is the third in a trilogy about the trauma left by war, which the team began filming in May. “We knew we wanted to tell a story about healing from trauma, and the choice of song landed on ‘Læknisgaldr’,” says Franz. “A tiny team with a great mission traveled first to a viking market in Borre, Norway, and then to rainy mountains in Iceland. But during the filming, it became clear that the story was too big for one video only.” For “Seidh” they took the Haarii warriors who dance at their shows to a forest in the Netherlands.
The story isn’t being told in order: “Seidh” is part three, “Læknisgaldr” part two, and part one, “Slagt”, has no release date yet. “Læknisgaldr”, out since 13 October, has drawn 981,000 views on YouTube in four weeks.
Text by Alba Puiggròs