Beirut’s Hadsel is a Majestic Lesson in Personal Reflection

In the winter of 2020, Zach Condon adjourned to a remote cabin on the island of Hadsel in the northern state of Vesterålen, Norway. Craving solitude, he’d just canceled an extensive Beirut tour and needed time to recover, both from mental health issues and a nagging throat ailment. Exploring nearby, Condon came across the beautiful Hadselkirke church and its pipe organ therein. He sat at the organ and began to play. Day by day, his keyboard experiments started to take shape. Condon brought a mobile studio with him to Norway, just in case, and started recording the ideas that were forming—both in the cabin and in the church.

Arriving back home in Berlin just as COVID was closing in, he played the tapes back and started adding more layers—trumpet riffs, synth melodies and flecks of South American Tropicália. However, as the time when he’d usually call in musician friends and collaborators to help build his experiments into a fully formed album arrived, Condon decided to plow on alone. He dug out an old baritone ukulele to complement the richness of both organs’ chords and compiled his own rhythms using hand drums, shakers and an old drum machine. Things fell into place and Beirut’s Hadsel was born. Condon has been making music under the Beirut name since 2005, releasing Gulag Orkestar in 2006. 17 years and seven Beirut albums later (2021’s Artifacts was a collection of singles, B-sides and unreleased work) Hadsel echoes with Condon’s trademark vocals and alt-folk and world music sensibilities. It’s also filled with a sense of exorcism that’s not yet been present in his previous work.

Admittedly, it would be hard to write an album that revolves around a church organ without it floating on an ecclesiastical, meditative undertow. Condon not only embraces this reverence, but he adds to the sensation by filling out his vocals over and over until they take the form of a church choir. (The album’s opener—and title track—is positively monastic.) This is a firmly secular set, though, and Hadsel’s spiritual side is inspired by Condon’s introspection and conscious interpretations of his Norwegian surroundings. If this sounds like the project swerves towards a world of forest bathing in sensible knitwear, rest assured that Condon’s use of inspired production ingredients keeps the album focussed. Frankly, who would have thought that a ukulele and an arsenal of home-cooked Latin American rhythms would work alongside a wheezy church organ? Zach Condon did, and he pulls it off with aplomb. Thus, the “Arctic Forest” track leans towards full-on bossa nova territory, while “Baion” is a sedated take on the Brazilian tempo of the same name that reflects the beat of the heart, all augmented by Condon’s yearning trumpet sweeps and yelps.

Condon’s vocals are buried throughout the album’s mix, undoubtedly by design. The lyrics that do occasionally surface swing from melancholia to hope and back. On “Baion,” he admits “Since you’ve gone I don’t know what’s gone wrong” and “So Many Plans” is equally contemplative, as he shifts from nostalgia to thoughts of better days ahead, singing “we had so many plans, leap from the sill, see where we land. We had so many friends, maybe we’ll see them again.” For album highlight “The Tern,” Condon suggests “It’s not too late to find where you are, you’re not too late to find who you are” alongside cheerful calypso drumming that gives the whole thing a singalong feel. On “January 18th”—assembled around organ stabs and a ‘70s-era synth figure—the fragility in Condon’s voice recalls early-2000s ANOHNI and the Johnsons (not a bad thing). “Süddeutsches Ton-Bild-Studio” is the soundtrack to an unwritten Scandinavian fairy tale, and Condon’s swaying ukulele almost turns “Island Life” into a Hawaiian love song.

Elsewhere, Condon pursues his familiar Beirut habit of naming tracks after places. The organ instrumental “Melbu” is named after a town near Hadsel, as is “Stokmarknes,” in which Condon wonders “Who knows what we’re in for? I’ve been here before” under gulping, rattling percussion and brass frills. Named after a Norwegian topographical feature, the pump organ on “Spillhaugen” is sent through a phaser as more bossa nova beats buoy the track along. Given Zach Condon’s well-documented uneasy relationship with touring, and the fact that Hadsel features him and him alone, it’s likely that Beirut will now become a studio-only concern. Hadsel is the sound of a weary man dealing out his thoughts on a table in a cabin far away, and using extraordinary musicianship to put them in order. The result is a lush, majestic album.

Read our recent feature on Beirut here.

Simon Coates is a music, culture, and civil rights writer with bylines for Dua Lipa’s Service95 project, The New European, Index on Censorship and more.