A Chat with Börn: Your New Icelandic Post-Punk Saviours

Börn is a four-piece band hailing from Reykjavik, Iceland, which features three girls and one dude. I stumbled across this band via the dude, Fannar, who plays in Ofvitarnir as well as drums in Börn. Ever since their self-titled LP was posted on the internet somewhere I’ve been listening to it non fucking stop. It has nothing but dark catchy riffs, amazing female-fronted vocals, with a perfect glimpse of all your favourite post-punk morphed into one amazing sound. They mention Christian Death and Killing Joke as some influences for the record. Those references seem more than apparent when you listen to the songs over and over again.

I’d say that this is one of the best punk records of the year, and if they weren’t so distant, the record would be picked up really, really fast by the rest of the world. Not saying it’s too late because the record was put out only last month by Reykjavik-based label Paradísarborgarplötur (PBP).

As there isn’t much known about Börn other than that they used to go under the name Norn, I caught up with Fannar to find out a little bit more.

Noisey: Hi Fannar. Tell me how the band started.
Fannar: Alexandra, our vocalist, and I were both obsessing over Christian Death and this Icelandic post-punk band called Vonbrigði so we wanted to do something similar. I wrote some songs and asked our friend Thorir Georg, who plays with me in Ofvitarnir, to help us out to record some songs with him. That worked out great so we decided to put together a band. Our bass player, Júlíana, was in a another punk band with us called Tentacles of Doom, that was breaking apart, and we loved playing with her, so we asked her to join. We then asked our friend Anna to play guitar, because we thought she knew how to play. Turns out she didn’t, but we liked hanging out with her so much that we didn’t really care.

You guys used to be called Norn right? Why the name-change?
There was a local black metal band that stole our name. It got kind of confusing. We were pretty inactive at the time so we just decided to change the name. We were thinking of raising a nithing pole, which is like a pole with an animal head on it that you use to curse your enemies, but changing the name was easier.

How has the band changed since Norn?
We’ve started writing the songs together now and we actually practice on a regular basis. We’re far from being a very disciplined band, but we’ve become more focused. We’re more of a unit, rather than being just friends with a few songs and never really getting anything done. Also, our lyrics have changed from being more personal and abstract to being direct and political.

Tell me about the record and how you guys went about writing it – was there a certain vibe that you guys were going for? From the early Norn cassette & demo, you could sense more of a darker post-punk vibe to it like Christian Death. That seemed to carry on with Börn.
When the songs for the cassette were being written we were still obsessing over Christian Death and were listening to Rudimentary Peni’s Death Church a lot as well. So when I was mixing the recordings I was thinking it would be really cool to make the whole thing sound like a weird black metal tape or something, even though the songs were just kind of typical death punk. But everything about the new record came more naturally. We just started to slowly write new songs together and throw out most of the songs that were on the tape, learning how we wanted to sound in the process. There was never really a specific idea or concept about the vibe of the songs, except we wanted them to be dark, gothy, and punk. Also trying hard not to go overboard with the drama. But, there’s a lot of Killing Joke and Vonbrigði in our songs especially in the way they sound, the heavy bass against the trebly guitar, and I wrote a couple of parts where I was trying to rip off Cola Freaks and there’s probably some bass lines in there somewhere that were based on something off Death Church. We never sat down and decided how our next record would sound, it just kind of happened.

Actually wanted to ask you about your lyrics. It’s all in Icelandic so it’s a bit hard for me to understand but you said it was a little bit more political and direct earlier. What specifically in the lyrics are you talking about? What’s up with Reykjavik as far as punk and hardcore is concerned? Seems like a place where if you look for it, you can definitely find some really good bands, but it doesn’t really get that much notice due to your distance. Ofvitarnir, Muck, Manslaughter, and Thorir Georg are some good ones but are there any other bands you recommend we should check out? Comparatively, Reykjavik is a small city by numbers so I’d assume everybody knows everybody within that scene, but are all these bands connected in a way? Are they all sharing members? Does everybody just say “fuck it, I’m over this band, I’m starting another band” type of thing? Are there any other cities or towns in Iceland with good DIY music scenes? Akureyri maybe? You only really ever hear of things going on in Reykjavik.

Tell us about your label, PBP. Do they only focus on bands within Iceland or Reykjavik? What are some plans for the label?
PBP is more like a collective than a label. We basically just wanted to have something, a name and a logo, that could make it easier to promote our releases and because we have a million different projects, people would know where to find everything we’re doing. We’ve released one CD, I think, by a band that didn’t have any members that were a part of our collective. We have no real plans. Hopefully we can put out another Börn record next year and there’ll be an Ofvitarnir release at some point. Other than that I have no idea what we’ll do next.

And what are Börn’s plans for the future?
We’re going to start writing new material this week and record some stuff for an EP this autumn, which will be out next spring if everything goes according to plan. Then hopefully we can book some tours next year.

Any specifics for the tours?
We have a friend in the US who wants to help us tour there next spring. Hopefully that works out. Other than that, nothing solid is planned.

Fingers crossed. Thanks, Fannar!

Stream Börn’s record above. You can keep up with Börn on their Facebook page, or/and buy a physical copy of their LP here.