Fables

As children, fables taught us that all peculiar stories must contain a lesson and that the world at our feet is ultimately moral, a place where actions lead to consequence that leads, in turn, to instruction: an anthology of wisdom and what not to do. Growing up, the neatness of that framing starts to look absurd. Call it edging if you want to, but it’s in this daring space that Brimheim’s third album sets out its manifesto. Closer to Kafka than anything by Aesop, Fables makes a play for our wanting to know what it all means, and how it all ends, but tenderly slides those answers out of reach.

Brimheim is the invention of Malmö-based Danish-Faroese musician Helena Heinsen Rebensdorff, who comes from a background in visual art. Though character-based, her stories have no use for tut-tutting or told-you-so observers. She puts us right in the maze of her own world across these dozen songs, given narrative shape through encounters with suspension, turning mirrors, doorways, bells, and even a whale, into symbols and markers of a life lived in-between. 

The fable, once an instrument of caution, becomes a vessel for disruption, and where you might expect a lesson to pop up, Brimheim sends her songs in the opposite direction. “It’s like when you dream you’re falling but never hit the ground,” she says. “In dreams, there’s no arrival anywhere. You’re dropped into a scene, a story, a world, and something’s about to happen, a choice is about to be made. But then you wake up and you never get the resolution.”

Burnt out and in search of inspiration after a year of heavy touring behind her second album RATKING (2024), Brimheim rented a small cottage on the Faroese island of Nólsoy with her songwriting partner Søren Buhl Lassen. Cloaked in February darkness and with crashing, violent storms that would shake her from her sleep, the songs began to take on a sense of wonder, as if unmoored from place and time. Meanwhile she was dealing with volcanic personal change, finally coming back to herself after tapering off antipsychotic and mood stabilising meds following a misdiagnosis and almost 15 years in disabling medical treatment. That too made its mark on the music.

Feeling done with the electric guitar, Brimheim and Buhl Lassen eventually, through trial and much error, found themselves drawn to the harmonic language of progressive singer-songwriters from the 1970s. Falling down that rabbit hole was unexpected, she says, but it made sense in the context of the albums she’d lately been locked into, like Father John Misty’s God’s Favorite Customer and Loren Kramar’s “masterpiece” Glovemaker. “Through listening to those albums, and crate-digging for artists like Dory Previn, Judee Sill, Scott Walker, and Nick Drake, I got interested in timelessness both as a concept and as something to strive for, aesthetically and sonically,” she explains. “It’s not the only flavour on the album, but it very much became a compass once I found what tickled me.”

Lead single “My Collection” offers a darkly humorous way into Brimheim’s cabinet of curiosities. Here, in true fable fashion, a generous offer reveals awkward fine print. There’s a childlike petulance to how fiercely the character, a mysterious collector whose treasures are discarded things, escalates her ask. She’ll give you something precious, but only if you agree it’s precious; if not, prepare to die.

Things get even more Faustian on “Sweet, Sweet Dark,” where the ‘devil’ in the pact is darkness itself, given form as a seductive, almost motherly figure: comforting, familiar, and promising relief, at the small cost of being possessed. It’s a classic cautionary tale, with the twist that the choice is not a one-time thing. “I’ve always felt more alive in my writing when I get access to my subconscious, to the magical realm, to the world of symbols and archetypes that all humans seem to be born with,” she says, and Fables rarely strays from that blueprint. In “Girl at the Door”, an echo of her younger self arrives to tear down her constructed life, to literally unravel it. Is she destroying something false or something valuable? Brimheim, as ever, leaves it up to us.

In “Somebody Else”, which loans from vintage, circular pop, the character looks into a broken mirror and imagines a new face for herself from the shards, large enough to climb in, to eclipse her shame. The moral, if there must be one, may be that making ourselves bigger is not the same thing as making ourselves whole.

Not all of Fables’ thresholds are quite so apparent. There’s the bridge on “Deep Sea Creature”, with its dynamic, Five Leaves Left-inspired strings; the velvet rope of “Arsenic”, where a bite becomes a kiss, from one intention to its opposite; and the steps of “Sainte-Chapelle (Paris, Baby)”, the album’s horn-flourished closer where all things bright and beautiful seem to be within reach, but once again Brimheim abstracts them away. 

Even when Brimheim steps out of her archetypes and into the modern world of “iPad Glare”, a classic fable element remains: that what soothes us in the short-term can trap us over time. With zesty lines of mellotron accordion inspired by the music of young Swiss virtuoso Anatole Muster, it’s as close to a folk jig as Brimheim’s ever come. But still, beneath that brightness, a longing for the sacred remains, even as the character stays caught between the online anaesthetic and the faint pull of existence beyond the glowing screen.

Where the old stories promised that fate would show the way, Fables keeps its characters waiting – for rescue, for a sign, for someone just to say, “You are enough” – but not out of spite. As frozen and as brash as they are in their fear and self-loathing, Brimheim gives them agency too. “You cannot be brave without being scared, and I've been so scared,” she says. “But it helps me to externalise these things. Then I can step back, laugh at the absurdity, and show them some kindness.”