Juni Habel and the slow, deliberate bloom of becoming

As a songwriter, her language is vibrant and sensory, often heavily symbolic and occasionally grand, exploring memory and feeling as both a mythic space and a mirror. Songs not really for performing but for participating in, almost, shaped by a want for communion and play, and, as ever with Habel, a sensitive compulsion to hide.

Evergreen in Your Mind, her upcoming third album, is the closest she’s come yet to tipping the balance in favour of showing her hand, indulging more in rhythm and a deepening commitment to the details. There’s more light than shadow in her forest folk this time around, more emergence than retreat, but not necessarily more answers.

Arriving at the National Library of Norway on a blizzarding afternoon last month, Habel admits she came to the interview not really knowing what to say about the songs. Unlike her first album, All Ears, which was born in a fit of inspiration, and her second, Carvings, where one central element was grief, Evergreen in Your Mind is thematically amorphous by comparison, and unfixed in time. More a pick ‘n’ mix, she says, than a meticulously plotted out statement.

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Recorded in quiet corners of the old, yellow wooden house she shares with family and friends, about an hour south of Oslo, as well as in the school where she works part-time and the loft studio of co-producer Stian Skaaden, the album came together in fits and starts over two years of recording, with some songs dating even further back, to Habel’s early days. But what she’d lightly feared might end up sounding unfocused and haphazard has, through tactile, playful experimentation and Skaaden’s steady hand, emerged into the light as a cohesive, spellbinding whole.

“If there’s a red thread for this album, it’s the same red thread for all the songs I write,” she says. “I feel like they are all, in a way, about coming out of my shell and being able to create whatever’s in my heart. There are so many barriers and fears that keep me from creating in a very free way, but I do think the songs are always guiding me, always telling me I can trust whatever wants to come out.” Later, she adds that her songs are “all about surrendering, in one way or another,” suggesting that perhaps the same is true, in fact, of all art.

As a songwriter, she says, her most vital surrender is to the wild stream of music that flows freely all around. Then, once connected, the stars align, a feeling is located, and Habel remembers her drive. “That feeling is what keeps me going,” she explains. “Not only to experience that connection myself, but also to share it with others. I genuinely believe that the music just passes through me, as I think many other artists have said before.”

Accordingly, Evergreen feels both intimate and fragmentary, seemingly always in flux between an outer and an inner world, sort of reminiscent of the way Virginia Woolf describes consciousness in To the Lighthouse – as a sum of “myriad impressions: trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel.”

In Habel’s quiet observance, flies on a windowpane can spirit up a vision of drowned statues and dragons, and time itself can manifest as both guardian and foe. Across the album, she sings of its solidity, its feebleness, of battling time “with nothing,” and of sinking into “a veil of hidden hours,” while on recent single “Stand So Still”, the album’s sparkling folk-pop centrepiece, she sings of time that’s turned and returned, as if we have no agency or ownership at all.

“I don’t think the song has decided, really, if standing still is a good thing or a bad thing,” she says wryly, explaining how she wrote it at a time of feeling directionless and stuck, like a compass dial in perpetual spin, circling the same unanswered north. Regardless, she’s on much better terms with inertia these days, more aware now that stillness does not equal nothingness but a doorway to what’s already inside her – a revelation she says has “meant so much” and rewarded her with a more concrete sense of freedom, in her daily life as well as in her art.

Like the Norwegian poet Hanne Bramness, whose work often treats moments of quiet attention as, in some sense, transformative, Habel finds her motivation often comes from “subtly observing the ways of life” and “the movement of people” around her. Always watchful, there’s a sense of curiosity to her writing that frets and frays, gently, against a backdrop of unease.

“I’ve been learning to recognise uneasiness as a physical feeling that I can find in my chest and hold,” she tells me. “You don’t have to understand it, necessarily. You just have to learn to embrace it and make space for it, and learning to do that has, I think, liberated me in incredible ways. Now, I am the safety I’m giving to myself.”

As it turns out, Habel does in fact have plenty to say about Evergreen’s songs. In little over an hour, our conversation touches on everything from Ragnarok to Jungian philosophy and the TV adaptation of Sally Rooney’s Normal People, which served as a perhaps unlikely inspiration for the song “I Lay My Trust”. Here she writes of surrender to uncertainty, or perhaps as a way to free ourselves from shame. When she sings of battling time with nothing, it’s the recognition of futility that hits. After all, we can only put up a resistance for so long when faced with something that’s impossible to fight.

“I haven't always been very good at feelings,” she admits. “I'm more of a thoughts person, but I'm learning more and more that my feelings are actually who I am. Whether I like it or not, my feelings are my number one guide.”

Habel credits her mother for this late-found wisdom, inspired by her expressiveness and worship of emotions, personalities, and music that hold a powerful charge. You could say she rebelled against that in her own aversion to “people who feel too secure in what they do,” choosing mystery over might every time, but Habel has her more forward moments too.

Whether it’s proclaiming “I cannot only trust god, because I'm god myself” or leaning into eroticism as a creative force in itself on Evergreen opener “Another High”, the freedom she feels she’s acquired since Carvings can’t help but keep showing up.

“I do feel like I’m developing all the time,” she says. “I can feel sometimes that things have changed in me, and I don’t always know why. All I can do is trust that life will push me in the direction that I’m supposed to go and that I’ll end up where I need to be to learn what I need to learn.”

Of course, she recognises her own responsibility in the process too, and Evergreen resounds with the courage that it takes to be patient, to not rush but to wander carefully, observantly, through landscapes of attention. Where music is concerned, she says she has the urge to “pull out everything" she has to give, “because I only have one life and I don’t find it hard to get ideas for songs,” but there’s a price tag to that impulse, as she implies on “Tessa”, a cascading hymn to knowing when to give yourself some slack. “It’s very easy to hustle,” she says, “and I think it’s important to be a bit cautious of that, because I do have the sense that I can easily burn out and grow tired.”

As a child most often found with her nose deep in a book, ignoring everyone around her, Habel says that her real life often felt less urgent than the worlds she could imagine herself, and not always in a good way. Everything that could go wrong would do so in her mind, but these days those intrusive thoughts have mostly fallen away, settled by the new conciliation with feelings of unease she spoke about before.

Even when it comes to the wild west of the music industry, Habel’s tone has changed to one of taking control, if only in the sense of accepting that she has no control at all. “The system right now is so chaotic that it challenges me to really stay centred in what my goal is in all of this,” she says, “which is to maintain focus on the music and the people that want to take part in it.”

Again, it’s participation over performance that fills her cup. When she plays a show, her mantra is to “listen in to what the moment wants to offer,” firstly as a way to “find the real moment,” and secondly as a way to perhaps give herself permission to “give a little more.” You won’t find Habel belting out a power ballad or carried through the crowd in a stagedive, mind. The mystery will always come first, because that’s what feels most genuine, most Juni. “I live to keep the colours close to me,” she sings on Evergreen’s penultimate track – another song rooted in fantasy that equally feels close to Habel’s own bones.

It's easy to confuse motion for meaning, she’s realised, and that pushing herself is not always advantageous when simple, unforced curiosity can open up just as many doors. Songs like “I’d Like to See It” and “Another High” are adventurous in their own way, as tributes to longing that are both deliberate and deeply felt.

Asked if she sees longing as something to be satisfied or something to be lived with forever, with no limit to the another-highs, she exhales loudly and laughs.

“Oh yeah, that’s a big question,” she says. “I think you can be satisfied for a short time, like I was when I finished this album, or when I’m working at the school and things are going really great. I feel fulfilled. But then I start to question everything. Even asking myself sometimes if I’m satisfied, actually, with the songs I’ve made already, do I even want to keep going?”

It's not unusual for artists to question everything after the fact, but in my view it’s simply part of the cycle of creating that we have no choice but to welcome. To lay our trust in defeat, to borrow Habel’s own words, is to clear the way for something new and fertile to emerge, like the rebirth of the cosmos after Ragnarok and the fall of the Norse gods.

She nods and smiles. “Yes, and I want to keep being hungry,” she says. “It’s always been my dream to just make music very quickly and not think about it at all. But I know now that I can’t just sit and wait for songs to find me. I have to put in some effort, to hunt them and to find them. I have to be really conscious of what’s going on.”