Back in 2018 Susanne Sundfør played a show at the Barbican that proved how she was capable of producing mesmerising, grandiose music. It saw her playing reimagined versions of songs from her 2017 album Music For People In Trouble and we described it as “a startling, theatrical, overwhelming performance”. Fast forward eight years and the sense of scale and ambition can still be felt on eighth album Revelations Of Divine Love, although it’s a very different album in nature to its predecessors.

We last heard from her in 2023 when she released blómi, a more conventional outing that reconfirmed her strengths, namely bright songs delivered in her crystalline voice. Since this release she has become a mother of two and moved away from life in the city to for a quieter existence in the Norwegian countryside. Revelations Of Divine Love seems to take inspiration from both of these life events.

The album was recorded live in a Norwegian church using only pipe organ and voice, and is based on Revelations Of Divine Love by English medieval theologian Julian of Norwich, the first known book written in Middle English by a woman. The album is bookended by brief spoken word pieces, ensuring the text itself has early and late prominence. It begins musically with the gently fluid undulations of I It Am which drift into the melancholic lamentations of For He Standeth All Alone. The tone is overtly spiritual and religious but there’s elegance and depth also. Sundfør’s voice is impeccable as always, conveying the text with solemnity and grace.

Mercury Prize nominee and BBC Jazz Award winner Kit Downes co-composed the score with Sundfør and he also plays the organ on the album, most notably on the punctuating instrumental interludes that break up the vocals. On Hazlenut the sound is both bracing and illuminative, later on Vision it takes a more gothic dimension. Elsewhere, One High Love features more in the way of softly billowing clarity and The Blessed Wound emits a certain lightness in its vocal pirouetting.

The late stages contain perhaps the strongest moments. Charity offers some relief in its understated glimpses of melody while All Shall Be Well is arguably the most hymn like track on the album in its structure and sound (also being a meditation on childbirth, an act depicted on the album’s cover). One suspects it would sound even more powerful heard in its natural environment of a church.

There is a minimalism, sense of restraint and possibly even coldness that comes close to feeling a little austere at times on Revelations Of Divine Love, qualities that possibly limit the degree to which the listener can fully emotionally engage with it. Regardless, it’s still a fascinating addition to Sundfør’s catalogue that increases the sense of enigma around her as an artist.