Kings of Convenience Tickets

When 12 years elapse between albums, you might well assume that there has been some dramatic rift. And when you learn that an album has been recorded across five years in five different cities, you might expect
something fiendishly ornate, larded with fancy production and guests galore. But neither of those things are true. Peace or Love, Kings of Convenience’s fourth album, sounds as fresh as spring: 11 songs about life and love with the alluring beauty, purity and emotional clarity that you would expect from Kings of Convenience. It’s just that, for Eirik Glambek Bøe and Erlend Øye, making music together is never a straightforward business.

Eirik and Erlend met at school in Bergen, Norway and first performed together in the rock band Skog before breaking off and forming a duo in 1999. Their unimprovably titled 2001 debut, Quiet Is The New Loud, made them inadvertent trailblazers of a new wave of intimate, acoustic music. “We told our record label we’d need two weeks and it took three months, and then it just went downhill from there,” Eirik laughs. Riot on an Empty Street came out in 2004 and Declaration of Dependence in 2009.

Both men have a wry sense of humour and a winning emotional frankness but from the start they had very different aspirations. Eirik loved the studio while Erlend craved the road. Eirik chose to stay in Bergen and start a family (he has three children) while Erlend preferred to travel the world. He toured clubs as a DJ, solo artist and frontman of the pop group the Whitest Boy Alive until he developed tinnitus a decade ago.

Following Declaration of Dependence, Kings of Convenience continued to tour in new and rewarding ways. In 2012, they played A-Sides/B-sides shows: two totally different sets on consecutive nights in the same city. In 2015, they toured Quiet Is the New Loud in its entirety, framed by an onstage interview. Erlend settled in Siracusa, Sicily eight years ago while Eirik remained in Bergen but they were never out of touch for long.