Progressive RockPost-rock
Imaginary Friend Records · 2 October 2026
“Mundane Morning” spends five minutes and forty seconds climbing out of percussion until the synths step in front of it, and it sets out at once how “III” was made. On the vinyl credits Erlend Viken is listed for voice, guitar, bass, keys, noise, percussion and banjo, and he is credited as well with the string arrangements, the cover art, the layout, the production, the engineering and the mix. It’s the third Giantsky album, the solo project of Soup’s singer and keyboard player, and it arrives two years and ten months after “Giant Sky II”.
The part one man can’t do is the part that decides the most. Tuva Halse and Jonas Arntzen Viken on violins and Astrid Hoffmann Tollaas on cello hold up the whole of “Limerence”, five minutes and one second with no drum pulse out front, and they come back to the centre of “All the Rage”, which starts and finishes restrained and spills over in the middle with both of the album’s voices — Viken’s and Myrtoula Røe’s — singing at once. The only other musician credited with a rhythm-section instrument is Andreas Kjøl Berg, on drums.
The second half swaps tools and gains from it. “Reveries of Gold”, four minutes twenty-six, trades the layers for acoustic guitar and banjo accents, and “Fleeting Glimpse” opens on a pulse borrowed from jazz before climbing seven minutes and twenty-three seconds and never coming back down; that track was already out as a single on 4 September, labelled with no great disguise as the “Commercial Version”. The additional electric guitars were recorded at Chem19 in Scotland with Paul Savage engineering, and Savage shares the mix with Viken.
All four tracks on side one resolve the same way: they start low and end with every layer open at once, so by the time “All the Rage” closes the side doing the same, the curve has stopped surprising anyone. Everything that sets the album apart, the acoustic, the banjo and the jazz pulse, turns up from the fifth track on, and Myrtoula Røe, credited right across the record, doesn’t get the foreground until “Sun World”, five minutes and twenty-one. Imaginary Friend Records sells it bundled with “The Further We Go The Deeper It Gets”, the second half of the diptych, together with a signed sheet reading “The Giantsky Trilogy”; the vinyl of both is out on 16 October.
Rating: 7.9/10
Text by Guillem Cardós