But if you did – consult a mystic, that is – you might find yourself going down a rabbit hole of radical, spiritual love. At least that’s what happened, in a nutshell, to Norwegian artist Susanne Sundfør, and it all started with a book. Specifically, the bestseller by British art historian Janina Ramirez, published in 2022.
Drawn in by the cover image, which replicated Hildegard von Bingen’s egg-shaped vision of the universe, painted roughly 900 years ago, Sundfør says she was immediately inspired. “It ticked all the boxes of what I find interesting,” she recalls, describing how Ramirez tells the stories of medieval women lost from or written out of the cultural canon, all but forgotten. “And that’s where I came across Julian of Norwich.”
Widely credited with being the earliest known woman author to write a surviving book in the English language, Julian of Norwich was a 14th century religious recluse who, at the age of 30, received a series of visions – the “revelations of divine love” from which Sundfør’s new album takes its name – after seven days of anguish and pain. What she saw, and spent the rest of her life trying to understand, was an all-encompassing concept of love, big enough to fit the whole world in all its brokenness.
For Sundfør, now felt like the right time for her personally to release something that carried a different message from her earlier work; something different from the dystopian unease of 2010’s and 2012’s , the destructive / thwarted / tortured emotions of 2015’s , and the themes of political upheaval and environmental devastation that shaped so much of 2017’s Music for People in Trouble.
Of course, that’s not to say her albums before now have not had their glimmers of hope – songs like “Mantra” and “Reincarnation” from Music for People in Trouble were already using spirituality as a gateway to hope, while 2023’s found her centering nurture and collective love – here on , hope is the whole point. “Having gone through some darker moments, I did experience hope in the end,” she says. “So I feel like I owe some reassurance to the world, but it’s also just where I’m at in life.”
Having dedicated her life to art since the age of six or seven (“It has been my religion”), Sundfør has always followed her gut rather than any outside notions of trend, but , even by her own standards, is a musical portrayal that few, if any, could have predicted.
Written and recorded with British pianist and organ player Kit Downes, who comes from a background of classical and jazz, the album emerged from an experimental live presentation of Sundfør’s catalogue using only church organ and voice. Their first shows together in Norway coincided with Sundfør’s discovery of Julian of Norwich, and those two strands felt instantly connected. “It turned out that Kit grew up only a few blocks from her church,” she explains. “So it felt like life was telling me that I was going in the right direction.”
Still, the making of didn’t come without its own trials. After giving birth to her second child in March 2025, Sundfør spent some time in hospital due to nursing complications, “which of course put a lot of strain on the whole project.” Ultimately, it was Downes who ended up writing up writing “more than half of the record,” and the album is naturally credited to them both. “I’m really glad it happened that way in the end because I think his writing is exquisite,” she says. “I feel like it worked out exactly how it was supposed to.”
It certainly makes sense that an album so grounded in faith should emerge from a more intuitive process, and not without its own tests of endurance. Julian’s book – a Victorian translation of which can be read on the Internet Archive – is not exactly a holiday read with its dense passages of fervour, but there is something to the language that Sundfør has extracted that does, over some listens, begin to help make sense of the world.
But what are the songs that have done that for Sundfør herself over the years? Which songs have been or remain some sort of compass in her life and in her work? BEST FIT invited her to talk us through them.