The Tallest Man on Earth Returns to Swedish Folk Roots on ‘Just Beyond Endless Mountain’

Kristian Matsson will release his next album as The Tallest Man on Earth on October 9 via Anti-. Just Beyond Endless Mountain follows 2023’s Henry St. and pulls from a specific source: the traditional folk music of Sweden’s Dalarna region, where Matsson grew up and has since returned to live.

The album announcement comes with a new single, “Deliver Me From Trying,” and a video shot in the Swedish countryside that reflects the record’s rootedness. In press notes, Matsson said he had to overcome a long-held resistance to his own cultural background. “Somewhere along the way I’d developed this immature aversion to the whole cultural inheritance I grew up with,” he said. “But now I live here again. I’ve read an incredible amount—not just about the music, but about how people actually lived in the old days.”

That shift in perspective runs through an eleven-track collection that Matsson describes as more personal than anything he’s made before. The song titles—like “The Forest Keeper,” “In the Silver Wire Up the Hill,” “The Village”—sketch a rural landscape that isn’t just backdrop but a deliberate framework. Matsson will tour North America behind the album this fall.