“I need that spiritual dimension to feel like I’m human, and to make sense of the world. That is like a red thread running throughout my life. This world is very strange and mechanical and materialist, and there needs to be more than just .”

, the errant genius of Norwegian pop music, is explaining why, at a time when her contemporaries are working with hip-hop artists or zeitgeist DJs, she is collaborating with a 14th century anchoress named Julian of Norwich. (An anchoress was a religious woman so devout she would ask to be walled into a church.)

The result is ‘Revelations of Divine Love’, a staggering record that showcases Sundfør’s once-in-a-millennium voice, singing Julian’s words while accompanied on church organ by British musician, . Even for this most iconoclastic of singer-songwriters, it represents a leap of faith – in her audience, and in herself.

Sundfør, now 40, crashed the public consciousness as a folkie, before swerving into electro – a phase that reached its apogee with ‘’ (2015) – and shimmying back out again. Until 2018, she toured extensively, headlining major venues like London’s Barbican, where she presented her jaw-dropping ‘Music for People in Trouble’ AV show. Then she split from the well-trodden path. In these past eight years, she has barely performed away from Norway – and hasn’t played outside Scandinavia at all.

Anyone lucky enough to catch her recent domestic gigs, though, can attest that her questing creative spirit and gambler’s instinct have only intensified. In 2023, she decided that a national jazz festival would be the best place to reintegrate electro-pop floorfillers into her set. Prior to playing last summer’s sun-baked Piknik i Parken, she announced that the theme of her performance was “Come join me in the darkness”, before confronting the crowd with the malevolent throbbing of her song, ‘’. In between those triumphs, in her near-mythic ‘church shows’ of spring 2024, she performed her audience.

Those two organ-and-voice concerts, one in the Drammen church where this album was later recorded, comprised an hour-long suite of six songs (plus brief encore), in which Downes’ playing wrapped rhapsodically around . Those were special nights for Sundfør: the serenity of the settings, the tranquillity of the crowds. They were also her first collaboration with Downes, on the road to ‘Revelations’.

Chatting via video from her “so-called studio” – a cottage in the garden of her Norwegian countryside home – she calls those performances “the precursor” to the new record. At that fertile time, she happened upon Julian’s writings, and something clicked. When she pitched the project to Downes, he revealed he had grown up in Norwich, just streets from where the anchoress experienced her visions.

“That was a very interesting coincidence,” Sundfør says. “But being a more spiritually aligned person, I sometimes think that with this album I was just following intuition. A few of the things happening around its creation do make it feel like it was destined.”

One was the way it intersected with the life of her friend, Gry, who died of cancer last Christmas. The album was written for her, and is dedicated to both Gry and her son, Isak, who passed away six months later. “Her whole journey, and my mourning of her, is a big part of the album,” Sundfør says. “She turned Catholic a year before she died, so was very interested in my doing this. We recorded it before her death, which meant I was able to send her a few mixes, and she got to hear them before she passed away.”

Sundfør’s fascination with Julian began with the author’s own story, and the fact her work is the oldest surviving text written by a woman in English. “I was interested in her from a feminist perspective, because it’s very strange that there is this woman who wrote about God, and how God is a woman, in a 14th century text – like, what was going on in Norwich in 1390?! And what a strange destiny her life was: to want to be with God so much that she wants him to make her sick, and then she gets sick and has all these visions, and spends the rest of her life meditating on them.”

What has it felt like collaborating with this remarkable figure across cultures and centuries? “It’s a different world today,” Sundfør says, “but a of crazy stuff was happening around Julian’s time – the Peasants’ Revolt, the Black Death – so in terms of drama and wars and end-of-times feelings, there are similarities. That’s partly why I find the text so interesting: it feels timeless. It’s surprising that it’s from the Middle Ages: this woman writing about ‘God is all love’ and ‘love is everything’, ‘it’s all love’ – it’s like a Beatles song.” Some passages, she says, could be lifted from New Age works. “You know: ‘God is forgiving and just wants the best for us.’ It’s not this judgemental God we see in western Christianity and society.”

When Sundfør has made forays into faith-themed music, observers have tended to frame them as purely secular artistic endeavours – but is she religious?

“I am,” she says, citing philosopher Iain McGilchrist as a key influence on her thinking, He writes the kind of hefty non-fiction books Sundfør is constantly devouring. In his latest, “he’s using 1300 pages to encourage people to believe in something sacred. I feel like, when I read him, I become more alive.” That spiritual dimension is integral to her sense of being, she says, before launching into a treatise on consciousness and matter, and ending in a fit of laughter at how trippy it all sounds.

When she speaks again, though, it is with disarming simplicity. “Um, so, yeah, I religious. But I am also very confused, and find it challenging, because I live in a secular society, and I’m logically driven. I let that go… and when I do, I can have more spiritual experiences.” In ‘Revelations’, she shares one such experience with us. The album is a perfect marriage of language and voice: two hands touching across time. In songs like ‘I It Am’ and the climactic ‘All Shall Be Well’, Sundfør gives full flight to her God-given instrument.

The album’s abiding theme is optimism: the desire to free the listener from what she calls the “negativity loop” of the modern world – and let in the light. This contrasts with her invitation last summer to her in that darkness. So is she responding to the same problem, just from the other side?

“Yeah!” she says enthusiastically. “We need the catharsis, but also some kind of star to navigate ourselves towards. People need an outlet that’s not just therapy or a pill. They need music, they need art, and for me – in my life – art has always been what’s gotten me through. It’s been more fundamental than . And I think we have forgotten – not all of us, not artists and people who care about art – that art is a more fundamental language language. Sorrow needs to be sung, and played, and painted.”

It is the same with love, she says. That can be understood as a process involving neurotransmitters and chemical reactions. “But the best way to describe it is through art. Or, of course, to someone. Because how can you really define it? That’s why the whole of pop history – the whole of history – is about describing love. We can never finish.”

That feeling of human continuity radiates from these new songs. Sundfør’s favourite is ‘The Blessed Wounds’, performed to pin-drop amazement in snowy Trondheim in February. Downes wrote half the record, but she composed that one alone. “The lyrics are so beautiful,” she says, “and can be translated into so many human experiences of sacrifice. It was also the first song I finished, and the point where I realised, ‘This album can be something of substance.’”

She will tour it for a week in Norway, back in the organ loft behind her audience. That allows the crowd to meditate on the music within a spiritual space, though there are more prosaic advantages: “Kit needs to cue me, and if I’m by the altar in the churches, I can only see his back.”

Then, next month, Sundfør returns to the road for a wildly different enterprise, reimagining her oeuvre in a bluegrass style. Partly she was influenced by a Norwegian folk revival representing “an underground reaction to the digitisation of society” and centred on an Oslo club where 20-somethings engage in 19th century folk dance. “But also I just really love American country – the kind that’s almost cheesy. That’s always been close to my heart. Dolly Parton – huge fan. Skeeter Davis!”

What was it about Dolly? “Her voice. She was one of the greatest singers of all time. But also her album, ‘The Grass Is Blue’. I didn’t know much about bluegrass, but I found that record a year ago and thought it would be so cool to do that as a concept: playing my back catalogue with that sound.” Sundfør asked on Instagram if anyone knew a world-class banjo player, and it grew from there. She has just added a third date at Oslo’s Sentrum Scene due to demand.

Nowadays, she is most comfortable – both emotionally and financially – playing on home soil. She used to be more conventionally ambitious. “With the earliest albums, I tried really hard to succeed abroad, doing long tours of Europe. And eventually, with ‘Ten Love Songs’ and ‘Music for People in Trouble’, I could go to London, Paris or Stockholm and break even. More recently, there are reasons I haven’t done any shows abroad. It’s mostly financial but also how much I can handle in terms of my mental health, and with being a mum.” In 2020, following the birth of her daughter, she experienced a terrifying episode of anxiety lasting over six months. “When we plan a tour, it usually comes down to, ‘Ugh, I don’t think I can do it, it’s too much for me.’ I don’t have that stamina other people do.” She pauses, grins. “Having said that, we planning a European tour. I don’t know when, and it might not happen. But I really want to come to London. Julian’s is an English text, so it makes sense to do a show there.”

Her priority remains her family; Sundfør’s second child, a son, was born last summer. “Becoming a mother added another dimension to reality,” she says. “Before I met my husband in 2018, I was much more independent – or I was independent but needing family and community around me. Now, you wake up and you think about your kids, and you go to bed and you think about your kids. Your life becomes about someone else, and that’s been really healthy for me.”

She has also discovered the sense of wider belonging she craved, having moved from Oslo to the nearby countryside of Nesodden. The impetus was budgetary: she couldn’t afford a home studio in Oslo. But she has been uplifted by Nesodden’s diversity; artists who’ve decamped from the cities mix with locals – and at least one biker gang.

As for Sundfør’s theoretical studio, this tiny cottage in the garden isn’t yet equipped to capture her next leap into the musical unknown. “We were gonna renovate it, but we can’t afford it, so I just need to write a monster hit,” she deadpans. “I shouldn’t release a church organ album, really.” Wait until ‘The Blessed Wounds’ drops, I tell her. She laughs, I think at the way her muse keeps dragging her away from large pots of money.

Now trading in 14th century religious writing, she has never sounded more assured, that incomparable voice dragging us once more to the heavens – this time in the most literal way. Is there a feeling that she’d like to leave people with, as the final notes of ‘Revelations’ fade away?

“I don’t know…,” she says. “I haven’t thought about that.” She frowns. “I think people need a break from noise, just in general, with modern life. They need a soundtrack to their meditative practice, an escape into something else than what is filling up their bodies, their brains. It doesn’t have be more concrete than that. I don’t have an aim to convert anyone. But I do think that something – some – created this world, and that this creator force is a loving force, and wants us well. And it’s good for us to think that. It becomes a more meaningful and beautiful world if we allow ourselves to trust this source of all.”

And with that final sentence, she stops sounding like a 21st century singer-songwriter at all, and sounds, well, like Julian of Norwich.

‘Revelations of Divine Love’ is out now via Bella Union,