Some albums arrive quietly. Others tear a doorway between worlds and ask you to step through. SKINWALKER, the 11-track debut from Ani Even — the experimental electronic alter-ego of Danish-Faroese-Greenlandic artist Bror — does the latter with chilling force. Released on October 31, 2025, it is a project forged from darkness, mythology, electronics, ancestral memory, and the messy complications of being human in a world on fire.
Ani Even is not merely a musical persona. It is a vessel, a shadow-self, a place where Bror merges tradition with futurism, softness with rage, tenderness with terror. Rooted in Nordic folklore and shaped by modern anxieties, SKINWALKER feels like a séance, a confession, and a club ritual held deep inside a mountain. It is a bold debut that refuses easy categorization, instead inventing its own space — what Ani Even calls chantcore or caverave. And once you enter this world, you’ll want to linger.
The album takes its name from the myth of the skinwalker, a being capable of transformation, luminosity, and danger. Here, the concept becomes a metaphor for identity and the impossibility of fitting into a single human shape. “We are never just one thing. Masculinity, softness, queerness, chaos, responsibility — they coexist,” Ani Even notes. This coexistence shapes every track, weaving raw emotional honesty with an otherworldly sonic palette.
From the opening moments of Be With Me, the album announces its dual nature. Haunting piano drifts like fog across a frozen landscape before rumbling percussion cracks the air open. Ani Even’s voice hovers in that space where yearning becomes invocation. The track is both love song and prayer — an introduction to the emotional terrain that lies ahead.
I Know That You Lie shifts the tone sharply, pairing industrial beats with distorted whispers, bursts of metallic rhythm, and a chorus that aches with betrayal. It is one of the album’s most accessible tracks, yet its undercurrent of unease keeps it firmly in the ritual sphere.
By the time the title track Skinwalker arrives, Ani Even has drawn the listener into a subterranean world of echoing chants and pounding electronics. Featuring multilingual lyrics and drones reminiscent of archaic hymns, the track explores the discomfort and liberation found in shifting identity. Voices overlap like competing selves. Beats mutate unpredictably. Nothing stays still. The result is a hypnotic, unsettling centerpiece.
It’s A Great Deal introduces a surprising tension: a sardonic critique of modern disposability wrapped in glitchy rhythm and fractured samples. Ani Even’s sardonic delivery hints at the absurdity of human negotiations with desire and consequence — a theme that threads through many tracks on the album.
The album’s darkest moment arrives with Rotten to the Core, a storm of industrial pulses and guttural vocal layers that feel pulled from deep within the earth. Here, Ani Even confronts self-loathing, inherited trauma, and the shame we carry in our bones. It’s harsh, but honest. That honesty makes it one of the record’s standout emotional peaks.
Things grow more celestial with Not My Friend, a track that merges electronic dissonance with ghostly choirs. Ani Even delivers lines with a disarming softness, even as the arrangement churns with conflict. It’s the sound of closing a door on toxicity, even when it hurts.
Run is pure kinetic adrenaline — a chase through the dark, driven by pounding drumwork and jagged synths. It’s rave music for the mythic realm, an anthem for those fleeing not monsters but their own pasts.
A Boy Who’s Crying flips the script again, leaning into vulnerability with minimalist production and a vocal performance that cracks open masculinity with tenderness. Where many darkwave or industrial records avoid fragility, Ani Even puts it at the center, offering an antidote to stoicism.
The final stretch of SKINWALKER is where the album becomes transcendent. Silent Service evokes medieval cathedrals with layered harmonics that vibrate like stained glass. Deep Void Visitor plunges straight into ritual ambience, with percussive patterns that feel ceremonial, as if inviting spirits into the room. And then comes the finale: Djævlebørn — “Devil’s Children.” It is a cathartic eruption of Nordic chant, techno ferocity, and raw vocal presence. It closes the album with a firestorm.
The entire record was crafted with an almost shamanic attention to space, echo, and texture. Darkwave meets folk chant. Industrial beats pulse beneath ancestral rhythms. Synths glimmer like ice. Choirs rise like smoke from a distant ritual fire. The multilingual lyrics — Danish, English, and Nordic tongues — deepen the sense of wandering through overlapping realities.
It’s no coincidence that Ani Even chose Brønshøj Vandtårn in Copenhagen — a cavernous water tower built like a modern cathedral — for the album’s immersive release concert. Few venues could match the scope of these songs. Few albums demand a sacred space.
SKINWALKER is for listeners who crave boundary-breaking work. Fans of Fever Ray will find the same primal, gender-fluid mysticism. Lovers of Arca will embrace its emotional experimentation. Those drawn to Wardruna or Björk will recognize the fusion of folk memory and electronic futurism. Yet Ani Even belongs to none of these worlds entirely. His debut stands on its own.
More than an album, SKINWALKER is a transformation ritual — a sonic journey through identity, grief, rebellion, ancestry, and rebirth. Ani Even invites listeners not just to witness him shifting shape, but to consider their own multiplicities. It is an album made for the shadows, for the caves, for the wild places inside us that rarely speak.
And when the last echoes fade, you feel altered. Perhaps that is the highest praise an experimental work can receive.
