Norwegian saxophonist-led group Moster! release new album "Bolts"

Norwegian saxophonist Kjetil Moster's quartet Moster! released a new album, "Bolts," on August 7 via the label Action Jazz. The band is Moster! on tenor and baritone saxophones, clarinet and electronics, Hans Magnus Ryan on electric guitar, Nikolai Haengsle on electric bass and Kenneth Kapstad on drums, with producer Jorgen Traeen, who mixed and mastered the record, treated by the group as something close to a fifth member.

Two of Moster!'s bandmates, Ryan and Kapstad, also play together in the Norwegian progressive rock band Motorpsycho, and that lineage shows across the album's five tracks. Opener "Desert Ride" leads with an intense, almost spiritual saxophone line over a driving rhythm section before Ryan's guitar takes over and pushes the track wilder, while "Ripping Circles" unfolds as one long collective improvisation that the review compared to Milford Graves' Babi Music and the experimental rock group Guttersnipe.

The middle of the record shifts tone: "Small Bubbles Of Light" opens explosively before settling into a mellower, clarinet-led texture, and the short "Not A Signal But A Door" is built around a simple melody over powerful drums. Closer "Bearings" is led by Ryan's guitar and carries, in the review's words, something of the feel of Black Sabbath, its solo growing progressively freer without the band losing its overall shape.

Moster! is little known in the UK, though the group performed there in 2014 as a trio with John Edwards on bass and Dan Erik Knedal Andersen on drums, a show that was later released as a live recording, and returned for three more UK dates in 2022. "Bolts" joins the group's run of albums on Action Jazz since 2024, following five earlier records for the label Hubro between 2013 and 2020.

The album lands in the release calendar among the rest of August's new jazz releases from Moster!.