I Was A King ‘Until The End’ Album Review by Rob Johnson
I Was A King, the brainchild of Norwegian vocalist, guitarist and songwriter Frode Strømstad, has been plugging away in their home country for 20 years and eight albums now, with their most recent effort, Until the End, due to drop on 17th October 2025. Having worked with such luminaries as Sufjan Stevens and Norman Blake of Teenage Fanclub fame, the band celebrated the end of their second decade in March of 2025 with their greatest hits album, Best Wishes – A Shortcut to I Was A King. This is not a band resting on its laurels, however. Until the End is not just a victory lap; it’s also one of the strongest selections of songs they have released to date.
The album kicks off with the woozy ballad ‘Snow on the Transmission Tower’, a song that sets the band’s stall out as disciples of The Weakerthans and Grandaddy (the latter of whom are probably the closest sonic comparison that mainstream audiences would recognise. Lead single ‘Dust Bunnies’ is built around a pretty guitar riff that breaks into a gorgeously maudlin chorus that sees the synth gently overlapping with an insistent bass line to great effect. ‘Sleepless Nights’ draws on Pavement and The Breeders with its lo-fi, grunge riff, while ‘November’, the longest song on the album, is pretty without ever really going anywhere, with Strømstad lamenting that he ‘had no worries but my own, just closed my eyes when it was time to go’.
‘Nowhere Near’ is perhaps the best song on the album – it’s pure indie pop perfection with a knockout chorus that recalls The Lemonheads at their best. ‘The Birthday Song’ plays on the fact that as you get older, birthdays become inherently sad, and it does so with the same country-inflected indie folk that has made stars of the likes of Elliott Smith and Conor Oberst.
The album closes out with the instrumental ‘Still Water’ leading into final song and title track, ‘Untll the End’, and what an album closer it is – wistful, nostalgic, but with a killer melody that lodges itself into your brain and just won’t budge. It’s typical of Strømstad’s uncanny ability to write a memorable hook, and the track serves as a perfect conclusion to what is a pretty stellar record. This is a band that deserves a wider audience. Or maybe they work better as da irty little secret. Either way, the music is great.
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