Norwegian-Irish singer and songwriter Tara Nome Doyle released her new studio album Værmin (pronounced Vermin) on 28 January via BMG label Modern Recordings. The album was produced by Simon Goff, the Grammy-award winning producer (for Hildur Guðnadóttir’s Chernobyl soundtrack). Tobias Humble (Gang Of Four, Ghostpoet), Anne Müller (Nils Frahm, Agnes Obel) and Larry Mullins (Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, Iggy Pop) can also be heard on Værmin.
On her new album, Doyle tells a tragic love story, rich in symbolism and nuances, orchestrated with piano, violin and synthesizers and sometimes pulsating beats. Her vocals are intense and varied, sometimes angelic, sometimes rough and threatening. Værmin is movingly beautiful, and yet it also celebrates the perceived ugliness that lives in all of us, but which we like to suppress and ignore. All the songs are named after animals that are considered unwanted pests: leeches, caterpillars, snails and worms. Værmin celebrates their beauty and in doing so also poses a political question: What would happen if we welcomed pests instead of rejecting them? Would we not then arrive at a much richer, balanced relationship with ourselves, with the world around us and with other people? Værmin is a great, wise and catchy album. The songs get stuck in your head immediately, pulling you into their depths: existential music by an extraordinary artist.
Tara Nome (pronounced as No Me) Doyle is a 24-year-old singer-songwriter and currently living in Berlin. Her first release, the song Down with You, was released in April 2018. More singles and an EP called Dandelion followed before releasing her debut album Alchemy in January 2020, which was praised by the German press (“… as if Kate Bush sings songs by Nick Cave in Berghain”, Spiegel).
Listen to the new single Snail I here.