Embla and the Karidotters’ The Fool Pushes Against Country’s Cowboy Tradition

Embla and the Karidotters have released their third album, The Fool, a record that uses country music’s conventions as material to work against. The band is led by Embla Karidotter, previously the drummer in the Norwegian indie rock group Razika, who writes and sings the songs.

Norway’s attachment to country is less improbable than it first looks. A Nordicana scene has taken hold there, with acts such as the Impossible Green and the Northern Bell alongside the long-running Hellbillies, and it sits comfortably beside the country’s folk culture. Karidotter’s band comes out of that context rather than out of Nashville.

Much of The Fool is built for stages. “Wanna Ride?” opens with chorus-treated guitar chords before a two-step fiddle pulls it toward pop crossover, and guitarist Benjamin Rø Haavelsrud takes a solo that leans on modal embellishments. The album’s most ambitious track, “Your Own Moon,” begins as a plain acoustic ballad and swells into a mass of voices. Producer Simen Følstad Nilsen adds pedal steel to “Wake Up and Smell the Coffee,” a road song about getting sober while touring with a country band.

What gives the record its edge is where it stands on the genre’s inheritance. The band calls itself a queer country band, and Karidotter’s lyrics work against the outlaw-cowboy, patriarchal tradition, frequently through blunt humour. “Cuntry,” a song about a barroom hookup, is the clearest case. The Fool often sounds like an argument with country music as much as a tribute to it.