“It isn’t good because it’s old. It’s old because it’s good.” Hekla Stålstrenga plays traditional Norwegian folk music, and with their ninth album they return to the musical roots and old songs that have shaped the band. This is reflected in the album title Heimført (“Brought Home”). The band name translates directly to “crocheted steel strings,” and is at once musical, abstract, and full of contrasts — a natural conceptual starting point.
The creative solution is layered and, much like folk music itself, is shaped by a process where the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts. By carrying the underlying idea from art direction through photography and design to stitching and documentation, each interpretation has added distinctive quality. As a bonus, the backside of the embroidery also turned out to form iconic motifs, with playful threads and an intriguing visual quality. The goal was to create a lush visual language that pays tribute to the music and the people. An informal expression that conveys the feeling of bringing something valuable home — while embracing curiosity, retrospection, and renewal.
We challenged traditional Norwegian aesthetics such as crochet edges, handicraft patterns, and rosemaling. The meeting between the digital and the tactile, the modern and the historical, gives the concept fresh energy. We let the fiddle — perhaps the strongest symbol of Norwegian folk music — serve as the epicenter and main motif of the album. From the fiddle, the music radiates outward and influences the surroundings and the band. The portraits were printed on cotton canvas and hand-embroidered in full size before being photographed and prepared for print. Early on, we saw that the idea was scalable, and developed the concept so the motifs would form the basis for ten unique single covers and a rich set of graphics for dynamic promotion. The end result is unexpected, modern, and energetic — perfectly in tune with the music.
