Reviewed by Ben Hogwood

What’s the story?

This new album from Norwegian singer-songwriter Sondre Lerche is his first in four years. The record explores a dissonance he has identified between the “increasingly dystopian world we live in and finding beauty and peace in your private life”, where “falling in love feels more and more like an act of defiance”.

Acrobats was recorded across no fewer than nine studios, Lerche’s eleventh album completed with long time partners and producers Matias Téllez and Kato Ådland, and Vetle Junker, Alexander von Mehren and Jørgen Trœen. There are orchestral arrangements by Sean O’Hagan of The High Llamas, with a substantial body of musicians from the Stockholm Studio Orchestra, Norwegian Radio Orchestra and sundry jazz and classical artists.

What’s the music like?

At times, epic – especially in the album’s core, where the songs Love Is All and Follow The River carry all before them. Lerche wears his heart on his sleeve in songs of unabashed romanticism, which works especially well when combined with his penchant for lyrical directness.

The music is pleasingly off-centre, with the urgent How Much Of This Was Planned also showing a carefree side. The strings of Little Kids curl around Lerche’s observations that “there’s cracks in everything”, while his playful side comes out best in Drive Me Away From You.

Love Is All is one for the romantics, beautifully observed and delivered, with an exquisite dialogue between Lerche and the clarinet of Solveig Wang. Meanwhile the chorus of Follow The River – inspired by an encounter with Mahler’s Resurrection symphony – is warm hearted and given with a ‘glass half full’ energy.

Does it all work?

It does, even if the songs sometimes have a lopsided structure. Lerche sings from the heart, and the arrangements are beauties.

Is it recommended?

It is. Lerche does not enjoy the same profile in the UK he perhaps did around 15 years ago, but this album shows his songwriting – and vocal delivery – are better and more meaningful than ever. In many ways he is the Nordic answer to Rufus Wainwright.

For fans of…Rufus Wainwright, Ed Harcourt, The Divine Comedy, Kings Of Convenience, Midlake

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Published post no.3,022 – Sunday 20 September 2026