Appel, Henrik – Shadows [IMPORT BROWN/WHITE GALAXY VINYL] – New LP

For as long as he’s been a solo artist, Henrik Appel has been in a constant state of evolution. His first album, 2018’s Burning Bodies, was a meticulous construction project, one that came together over a five-year period and that saw him chronicle, with searing honesty, the slow death of a relationship, with its nine songs written according to a stringent set of self-imposed rules, intended to keep the songwriting minimalist and bare-bones in nature.

If that was a stunning way of introducing himself as a solo singer-songwriter, his 2021 follow-up, Humanity, represented a remarkable progression of its own. It was born out of a break-up of a different kind, this time with his former bandmates in Stockholm outfit Lion’s Den; piecing together aspects of the vision he’d had in mind for the band’s never-realised second album, he built from them his own sophomore LP, one that took the classic feel of Burning Bodies and imbued it with adventurous new influences, as he began to carve out a genuinely singular sound.

Now, three years on from Humanity, Appel has made another ambitious left turn. Neither of his first two albums were made in complete isolation; on both, he enlisted the production services of Stockholm underground legend Martin ‘Konie’ Ehrencrona, and also collaborated on his lyrics with his partner, Emma Lind. Now, on this thrilling reinvention of a third record, Appel has turned away from perfectionism, placing chief importance instead on making a raw, human record. This meant opening up his songwriting process to his band, which comprises drummer and pianist Carl-Johan Groth and bassist Rickard Folke, with Ehrencrona chipping in on tenor saxophone, clarinet and transverse flute.

“I took the songs to rehearsal, and we’d improvise on the core structures together,” he says of the sessions for Shadows. “The idea I had was to make something like Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde or The Fall’s Hex Enduction Hour, an album where it’s the feeling that matters, not whether somebody’s played the part perfect. I was looking for something that felt organic.” Appel steadfastly refuses to repeat himself, and so set about opening up a litany of fresh creative avenues for himself on Shadows, including “different approaches to the writing, experimenting with writing lyrics in Swedish as well as English, playing around with volume, writing both quiet and loud songs. It’s creatively important to push yourself, to make sure you keep it interesting.”

By his own admission a “music nerd”, Appel’s unquenchable thirst for new music discovery - whether that be new artists, or older records he hadn’t heard before - means that every new album will bring with it a clutch of new influences for him to tastefully add to his palette. On Shadows, he continues to gradually work in touches of jazz, with Groth bringing his chops in the genre to the table. The standout ‘Allt är inget utan någon’ showcases how far Appel has come since he first started taking his cues from the likes of Charles Mingus; it’s an undulating jazz odyssey featuring a searing saxophone freakout.

Elsewhere, on freewheeling garage rockers like ‘Walking Down the Road’ and ‘I See’, his love for The Velvet Underground is as palpable as ever. "They're one of my favourite bands," he says, "but I was also thinking a lot of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. And then, Tindersticks, too, one of those bands who make huge music from a small core. I like that, bands making something massive without taking up too much space.”

As on Humanity, Appel has co-written lyrics for Shadows with his long-term partner, Lind, marking them out as a Swedish answer to Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan. “She washes, I dry,” is how Waits once described that particular songwriting partnership and it sounds as if Appel and Lind take a similar approach, mining their experiences in the life they share together in order to tap into common themes of both relationships to others and our relationships to ourselves.

Writing in his native Swedish for the first time, meanwhile, saw Appel become a more vulnerable songwriter. “I had to find my voice, literally,” he laughs. “I’ve always sung in kind of an American accent when the lyrics are English, but I had to figure out what dialect of Swedish to sing in, because I sound kind of Norwegian; the part of Sweden I’m from is close to the border.”

“But singing in English, I always felt like that was kind of a shield in front of my true feelings,” he explains. “It was like there was always this filter, because I wasn’t really singing in my voice, but more in the voice of my idols. So, it was very vulnerable, but I think it suits the album. I was exploring some feelings about getting older, I think, and feeling a little bit more fragile, and maybe not thriving in the storm the way you used to. I’ve been learning how to adapt to the start of a new chapter.”