GB – Adrenaline
Danish musician Gustav Berntsen, who records as GB, has signed to AD 93 and announced Herzsprung, his second album, due August 21. His debut Gusse Music came out on Copenhagen’s Posh Isolation in 2024, one of the label’s final releases before it shut down. The move to AD 93 makes sense: the label has been the most consistently interesting home for this kind of music for a few years now.
The backstory for Herzsprung is worth knowing because it shapes what you hear. Berntsen wrote the album while living in London, spending weeks cutting up copies of Metro, the city’s free daily newspaper, to assemble its lyrical foundation. He funded studio time with money earned from appearing in Jaguar’s 2024 ad campaign. There’s something characteristically deadpan about that combination: found-text poetics financed by car advertising. The songs were then tracked largely live to 24-track tape over a week in a studio in the Swedish wilderness, with a band working from what had previously been memos and notebook scribbles. Mastered by Noel Summerville.
Where Gusse Music stayed in a downtempo haze, Herzsprung pushes outward. The sources describe it pulling from 70s fusion jazz, Japanese noise-rock psychedelia, anthemic grunge, and outsider pop, and “Adrenaline” makes that range credible: fretless bass bubbling under zigzagging guitar, rolling percussion, the whole thing moving with a looseness that doesn’t feel studied. There’s something about the fretless bass in particular that caught me off guard — it’s an unusual choice that gives the track a slightly off-kilter warmth, closer to early 80s post-punk experimentation than anything currently fashionable. The album also features a collaboration with Alba Akvama on a track called “Pipe Dream”. A UK and European tour follows in September and October, plus an appearance at Roskilde Festival in June.
