The Tallest Man on Earth Looks Homeward on Just Beyond Endless Mountain

For most of his career, Kristian Matsson has been measured against American sources. When Shallow Grave arrived in 2008, the Dylan comparisons came quickly, along with a note about the detachment in his writing, a strange quality in a man then in his mid-twenties. The Wild Hunt followed in 2010 and fixed the persona: weathered voice, fingerpicked guitar, a sense of distance he never quite shed.

Just Beyond Endless Mountain, his first album since 2023’s Henry St., goes elsewhere. Matsson, now 43, drew on Swedish folk rather than American lore, working with polskas, traditional Scandinavian tunes in 3/4 time that stress the first and third beats instead of the first alone. The pulse lopes rather than settles.

The production carries as much weight as the source material. Matsson recorded these songs on old field recorders, so they arrive like gathered material rather than studio work. Opener “The Wildest of His Dreams” keeps the extra instruments at the edges, while “Colors” and the title track circle around return and repetition.

Henry St., his first record made with a band, split critics on release. This one is smaller and stranger, and it recovers something the recent albums were missing, even if the voice and the phrasing remain exactly where they have always been.