MØL: Dreamcrushers and Genre Defiers A conversation with Kim Song Sternkopf on evolution, vulnerability, and why flowery shirts matter. + MØL

February 01, 2026

MØL: Dreamcrushers and Genre Defiers A conversation with Kim Song Sternkopf on evolution, vulnerability, and why flowery shirts matter. + MØL - Dreamcrush album review By Mark Jenkins.

MØL: Dreamcrushers and Genre Defiers

A conversation with Kim Song Sternkopf on evolution, vulnerability, and why flowery shirts matter

By Mark Jenkins.

There's a moment early in our conversation with MØL's Kim Song Sternkopf where he pauses, searching for the right words to describe what Dreamcrush represents. Not in the manufactured, press-release way bands often do, but with genuine reflection—the kind that comes from a group who've spent years invested in the craft, pushing themselves beyond the comfortable boundaries of what blackgaze "should" be.

And that investment radiates from every second of their third album. From the instant Dreamcrush begins, there's an undeniable magnetism—the kind of record that demands immediate re-listening, not out of obligation but genuine need. It's a work that flows with purpose, each twist and tangent feeling earned rather than arbitrary, every song carrying its own distinct identity while contributing to something larger and more cohesive than the sum of its parts.

The MØL story begins with the creative partnership between bassist Nikolai Nørlund Sander and guitarist Ken Klejs—what Kim describes as a kind of magic, the foundational duo whose chemistry sparked everything that followed. But the band's true strength lies in their diversity: five musicians from wildly different musical backgrounds and preferences, somehow alchemising their disparate influences into something singular. The MØL sound isn't one person's vision imposed on others—it's a democratic collision where death metal meets dream-pop, where black metal fury learns to breathe alongside shoegaze shimmer.

Kim himself embodies this evolution. Across our forty-plus-minute conversation, he's candid about pushing his vocal capacity beyond previous limits, stretching himself to match the emotional scope the album demands. His harsh vocals don't just punctuate the music—they complement it, weaving through the instrumental layers with newfound musicality and purpose. It's not about being the loudest voice in the room; it's about knowing when to surge forward and when to let the guitars consume you entirely.

Dreamcrush is, above all, deeply reflective—emotionally mature in ways that demand your attention and patience. This isn't throwaway music designed for algorithmic playlists. Kim emphasises how music serves as the band's primary outlet for reflection, and they've structured this album with that intention: track placement matters, dynamics are considered, space is given for ideas to breathe and develop. It's meant to soak in, to reveal itself across multiple listens, to mirror the very themes it explores—dreams fading, new ones forming, the realistic (not grim, but real) struggle we all face navigating ambition against reality.

Lyrically, there's intentional ambiguity. Kim acknowledges the strange position vocalists occupy as the default "media face" of bands, yet he resists prescriptive meaning. The lyrics are self-reflective springboards—places where listeners find their own significance, their own crushed dreams and renewed aspirations. It's personal without being confessional, universal without being vague.

We also discussed their explosive Copenhell performance—and yes, the glorious arrival of colourful, flowery shirts that subvert every black-metal-uniform expectation. It's a small detail that speaks volumes about MØL's approach: there's purity in not being overly concerned with aesthetics, in rejecting the tired tribalism that still plagues corners of metal culture. Kim doesn't mince words about the gatekeepers who crucify blackgaze, the narrow-minded fans stuck nursing dated, shitty views about what's "true" or "kvlt." For MØL, being yourself—genuinely, unapologetically—and subverting expectations isn't rebellion for its own sake; it's creative survival.

And yes, playing Australia remains high on the bucket list. Hopefully soon.

What emerges from our conversation is a portrait of a band fully aware of its strengths, unafraid of its vulnerabilities, and utterly committed to the work itself. Dreamcrush isn't just another blackgaze entry—it's proof that genre boundaries only exist for those too timid to cross them.

WATCH THE FULL INTERVIEW:

https://youtu.be/NzEhh9OMGWw

MØL - Dreamcrush (Nuclear Blast, 2026)

Album review By Mark Jenkins

In the dim, rain-slicked streets of the underground, where the air hangs heavy with reverb and regret, MØL's third album Dreamcrush arrives like a slow-bleeding wound in the heart of winter. Released January 30, 2026, this is the Danish blackgaze outfit's most achingly beautiful and devastating work yet—a quantum leap beyond the raw, tremolo-drenched fury of 2018's Jord and the more refined, expansive architecture of 2021's Diorama. Where those records established MØL's mastery of the blackgaze template, Dreamcrush transcends it entirely, dissolving genre boundaries into something more elemental: pure emotional erosion set to sound.

The Descent Begins

Opening with the titular haze of "DREAM," you're immediately submerged in swirling layers of My Bloody Valentine-style shoegaze wash—but this isn't mere homage. MØL has absorbed the DNA of Kevin Shields' pitch-bent obliteration and weaponised it against the tremolo-picked violence of second-wave black metal. Guitars shimmer and dissolve like half-remembered memories, buried under Kim Song Sternkopf's distant, anguished screams that recall the early, spectral fury of Deafheaven's Sunbather—but where George Clarke's voice often soared toward transcendence, Sternkopf's harsh vocals burrow inward, clawing at something deeper and more private. This isn't about aggression—it's about erosion. The tremolo riffs build like storm clouds gathering over Scandinavian fjords, but they never fully break; instead, they linger, suffocating yet strangely comforting, pulling you into a fog where beauty and despair blur into one indistinguishable ache.

Navigating the Wreckage

"Små Forlis" (Small Shipwrecks—even the title bleeds metaphor) drifts into fragile, almost post-rock introspection reminiscent of Explosions in the Sky's quieter devastations. Clean vocals—a relatively new weapon in MØL's arsenal—float over hypnotic drones with a vulnerability that feels genuinely risky in a genre often armoured in blast beats and corpse paint. When the black metal undercurrent surges back, it's subtle, restrained, never showy—more akin to Wolves in the Throne Room's nature-mystic restraint than Darkthrone's frost-bitten brutality. The production, courtesy of the band alongside Chris Kreutzfeldt, allows every element breathing room; you can hear the decay trails on each note, the way the distortion doesn't just crush but flowers into something almost beautiful.

"Young" might be the album's emotional centrepiece: a triumphant yet tragic melodic riff that evokes Alcest's Écailles de Lune-era mastery of bittersweet grandeur, layered with the hazy immensity of Slowdive's Souvlaki and shot through with blackened despair. There's a moment two minutes in where the blast beats drop out entirely, leaving just a single guitar line suspended in delay—it's the sound of falling in love with your own destruction.

"Hud" (Skin) strips things down to raw nerve: sparse, echoing guitars and a rhythm section that pulses like a fading heartbeat, building incrementally to cathartic walls of sound that feel like drowning in emotion rather than violence. The way bassist Nikolai Nørlund Sander and drummer Bastian Thusgaard lock into these hypnotic, almost krautrock grooves recalls the best moments of Deftones' Koi No Yokan—heavy not through density but through inexorable forward motion.

Dream-Pop Meets the Abyss

"Garland" weaves ethereal, Cocteau Twins-esque dream-pop textures with post-metal heft in a way that shouldn't work on paper but feels inevitable in execution. Guitarist Francois Viggo Füchsel and founding member/guitarist Ken Klejs create these impossible harmonic structures—major-key melodies twisted through enough distortion and dissonance that they sound simultaneously hopeful and doomed. It's the sonic equivalent of watching flowers bloom through concrete, knowing they'll be crushed by the next footfall.

"Favour" and "A Former Blueprint" lean into alt-rock's angular melancholy—less overtly "metal" in their construction, more akin to Nothing's hazy introspection or the emotional sprawl of Deafheaven's Ordinary Corrupt Human Love. There's a maturity here in MØL's willingness to let songs breathe without defaulting to blast-beat intensity. When they do accelerate, it feels earned, cathartic rather than obligatory. These tracks showcase Sternkopf's expanding vocal palette; his cleans carry a fragile, almost androgynous quality that recalls Alcest's Neige without imitation, while his screams have evolved beyond raw throat-shredding into something more controlled, more deliberate—each shriek placed with surgical precision for maximum emotional impact.

Into the Infinite

"∞" plunges into infinite, droning abyss—seven minutes of sustained tension that nods to Sunn O)))'s amplifier worship while retaining MØL's melodic core. It's a bold palette cleanser before the album's devastating final movements. "Dissonance" lives up to its name with clashing harmonies that tear at the soul like Deathspell Omega's chaotic dissonance filtered through Swervedriver's guitar-pedal obsession. The production here allows the ugliness to coexist with beauty; nothing is polished away, yet nothing feels muddy or accidental.

The closing tandem of "Mimic" and "Crush" brings the album's thematic arc—aspiration crushed under disillusionment, dreams collapsing under the weight of reality—to its most gut-wrenching peak. "Crush" in particular feels like watching a slow-motion demolition: every element that built throughout the album's 48 minutes systematically deconstructed, leaving only ringing feedback and the ghost of a melody you'll chase forever but never quite catch again.

The Verdict

This isn't punk's snarl or hardcore's immediacy; it's moody, deeply emotive blackgaze at its most vulnerable—guitars that weep authentic tears rather than merely mimicking sadness, vocals that fracture between whisper and wail with the unpredictability of genuine breakdown, production that feels intimate yet vast, like staring into an endless mirror of loss where every reflection shows a different version of yourself you've abandoned along the way.

MØL has always understood that blackgaze's power lies not in the juxtaposition of beauty and brutality, but in revealing that they were never separate to begin with. Dreamcrush takes this philosophy to its logical conclusion, crafting a tapestry where fragile hope and inevitable collapse are woven from the same thread. Where Deafheaven reached for the sky, and Alcest wandered through forests, MØL navigates the interior landscape—the dreams we build in the spaces between sleep and waking, and the slow, aching realisation that reality will always grind them down.

In a scene increasingly crowded with blackgaze imitators content to recycle the Sunbather playbook ad nauseam, Dreamcrush feels painfully, uncomfortably real: a love letter to the quiet devastation inside us all, written in a language of bent strings and broken screams. If you've ever lost yourself in the glow of a bedroom amp at 3 a.m., chasing ghosts in the reverb, trying to articulate a feeling that exists beyond words—this is your requiem, your validation, your destruction.

Nuclear Blast's investment in MØL couldn't be more justified. This is essential listening not just for blackgaze devotees, but for anyone who's ever felt the weight of dreams deferred.