Review: June Habel • Evergreen in Your Mind
Evergreen In Your Mind, the third album by Norwegian songwriter Juni Habel, out in 2026 on Basin Rock: a record of fingerstyle folk. The acoustic record of a school building after four o'clock.
The last bell rings and the building empties in minutes. It's in that hour — the empty classroom, the school piano, the chairs left at odd angles — that Juni Habel recorded part of this album. She teaches. When the day is done she stays inside the rooms and switches on something that catches the sound.
Norwegian, third time out, an hour south of Oslo. The biographical detail counts for little. It counts for more to know that evergreen, in the title, is neither the tree nor the undying song: it's the memory that won't fade, the evergreen of the mind, what stays with you once the rest of the wood has dropped its leaves. And where does she draw it from, someone who works where other people's childhood passes through every day and never stops? Not her own nostalgia — nostalgia in transit, the kind that settles in a classroom the way dust settles on a sill, layer on layer of years that aren't yours.
"Another High" opens almost devotionally — a circular piece, and along the way synth tones gather, surfacing like echoes from below barely caught, the chorus brightening, air passing between the notes. "I'd Like To See It" carries the verse right to the threshold of the chorus and there, instead of singing, steps aside: a synth interlude takes the place of the words.
"Pearl Cloud Song" is where the thesis takes on flesh. An american primitive — the guitar turning over a tuning she stumbled into, fingers braiding lines the way Fahey does when he stops trying to prove anything — but underneath, keeping time, a four-to-the-floor kick, dry, metronomic. A strange and lovely choice: american fingerstyle lives on rubato, on breath, on time that bends; setting a rigid beat beneath it is like tethering a kite to an anvil. And yet it holds, because that beat isn't rhythm, it's presence — the body that stays in the room.
The title track, at the centre, works another seam: the fingerstyle is soft, and there's a deliberate EQ choice that cuts against the grain — mids pushed forward, highs filed down, that midrange-heavy sound 1970s folk had not by taste but by constraint, tape that couldn't hold the frequency extremes and smeared everything into one warm narrow band. Habel rebuilds that technical limit as if it were a colour: she isn't imitating the past, she's tuning the sound to the matter of the record, which is memory — and memory sounds like this, muffled, without brilliance. The voice settles into it and you can never quite tell whether it leads or is led.
"Stand So Still" is where you measure what this record actually is: technical refinement that unfolds slowly, without a single flaw — not even one of those sought-after flaws that singer-songwriter folk uses to seem human. Right after, "Gitarhum" does what the name says — an apiary instrumental, the drone of a hive left in the sun while no one comes to gather, field recordings and strings turning into atmosphere. The instrumentals live on an american primitive that isn't nordic cold, isn't desert dust, but comes indoors and sets about weaving the air of the room.
Toward the end the register drops further. "Sage" sits lowest, a harmonium holding the bottom like a piece of furniture too big for the room, and over it a guitar counting something, the days maybe, with the dull patience of someone keeping watch on an absence. "Colours Close To Me" plays on doubled voices, and "Statues" closes on her own image, of love dying "like abandoned statues lost at sea" — the least consoling ending.
There's an objection, and it should be said. A record all at the same temperature, the same uncanny stillness, risks the indistinct: eleven tracks that could be one long one. But to demand variation is to lose yourself in a question of form, and the form here has already found its perfect measure.
Forty-one minutes, all pleasantly of that northern-European skew that doesn't seek the centre.
Artist: Juni Habel
Album: Evergreen in your Mind 2026 (Basin rock)
Duration: 41'
Genre: folk, fingerstyle, modern folk
Tracklist: Another High, I'd Like To See It, Pearl Cloud Song, Tessa, I Lay My Trust, Evergreen In Your Mind, Stand So Still, Gitarhum, Sage, Colours Close To Me, Statues You?, Echoes of Love, Echoes of Love pt.2, Birds in the Wind, Petrichor, In This Beautiful Life
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