We’ve been covering the music of Varberg, Sweden-based experimental artist Le Days, real name Daniel Hedin, since the start of 2022 when I shared his vulnerable track, Red Little Hands (Only You Know.)
By Graeme Smith
Feature photo by Nadia Ursu
In the same year, he appeared in Jane’s Nordic Artists round-up and I ran the rule over a few of his releases, most notably his album Stuck In My Head (Alternate Recordings).
Are You Here? is the full-length follow up to that album giving us thirteen new insights into Le Days’ world. It’s a heavy-hitting and deeply personal collection. ““People will try to tell you what you are feeling,” Daniel explains. “They will say there are stages of grief and that’s how you will experience it. But the truth is, only you know where you are. We are not linear, neither is the sound in your head.”
The album opens with the delicate piano of Life and I was at once struck by the amount of emotion created by such a simple refrain. Le Days is the master of the minimal, creating powerful soundscapes with very little. Yet, his latest work still strikes right at the heart. He truly pushes what we know music to be.
Grief follows, a track that featured on our blog at the end of 2024. In the context of the album it provides some early melancholy. Lonesome piano seeks the company of terse, elongated strings during a mournful, stripped-back composition. It sets up the rest of the album beautifully as from there we get contemplative moments like Indifference (Denial) and Loss intermingling with palpable ones like Death and Rage. The latter pairs a soft melody with a fiery undercurrent that makes it a highlight.
There truly isn’t another artist like Le Days. His compositions do so much with so little and touch on topics in such a way as to make them seem entirely novel. It’s the true nature of artistry.
Are You Here? features Daniel Hedin on piano and voice, cello by Jonas Palm, Elin Grände Wood, and Fodor Barnabas, and violin by Okos Viola. It was mixed by Daniel Hedin, mastered by Collin Jordan, and recorded in an old church near to Daniel’s birthplace, a process that took four years to complete. It’s out now, available to buy as a digital download or on cassette via Bandcamp. You can give it a listen below.
