"Kinship" is the second full-length studio album by Danish metal act Iotunn. The album was released through Metal Blade Records in October 2024. It´s the successor to "Access All Worlds" from 2021. There have been no lineup changes since the predecessor. Iotunn formed in Copenhagen in 2015 and released the promising "The Wizard Falls" EP in 2016 and with the release of "Access All Worlds" they started making headlines.
Stylistically the material on "Kinship" is a natural successor to the material featured on "Access All Worlds". Progressive/power metal combined with both death, black, folk, and even doom metal elements, and all delivered in an epic and atmospheric package (it´s one of the better combinations of melodic tinged metal and extreme metal I´ve heard in a while). Lead vocalist Jón Aldará (Barren Earth, Hamferð) performs both epic clean semi-operatic vocals (both low end and high end cleans), death metal growling, and black metal snarling, and as a result the vocal part of the album is quite varied. The material on the 8 tracks, 68:23 minutes long album is both eclectic in style, epic in sound, but also powerful, heavy, and massive. It´s relatively polished, but still with enough rawness to pack a punch when that is needed. Other than the paatos filled and skilled vocal performance, one of the other great assets of "Kinship" is the harmony- and lead guitar work of the two Gräs brothers, Jens and Jesper. The album is loaded with soaring epic leads that´ll have you picture great mountains and beautiful valleys, fantasy castles and dark wizards. The scope of the music is almost cinematic in nature.
"Kinship" features a high quality production job courtesy of prolific Danish producer Jacob Hansen. This is a perfect sound production for this type of music. As mentioned above the sound is relatively polished and you can hear all details clearly in the mix, but there is still bite and rawness enough for this never to become a sterile listening experience. Combined with the intriguing, sophisticated, and powerful songwriting, and the high level musical performances, this results in a high quality sophomore studio album from Iotunn. A 4 - 4.5 star (85%) rating is deserved.
