feathers, didn’t begin with ambition. It began with curiosity — a few sketches, a borrowed studio, and a weekend that stretched for too long. Their first song, “walking talking loving”, became proof that something simple could still feel complete. “We finish songs from start to finish in maybe ten hours in total,” Thomas says. “That’s new for me. I used to spend months circling ideas until they died. Now it’s just: show up, play, record, trust it.”
Feathers is the new project of longtime friends Morten Samdal (Onsloow, You Could Be a Cop, Youth Pictures of Florence Henderson) and Thomas Ingdal (AqPop, Chimerical, a straight up cat, Spun For Miles). Though they grew up together in Tiller, Norway, their different musical backgrounds have shaped their playing, but in Feathers they’ve found a common ground — direct, emotional, and expansive.
His partner in this quiet experiment, Morten, never worried about right or wrong. “That first track set the tone,” he recalls. “It wasn’t trying to be grand or cinematic. It just sounded honest, like something that was always there, waiting for us to stop hesitating.”
The song breathes with restraint. Guitars weave through small spaces, percussion moves softly underfoot, and emotions hang like fog. There’s no nostalgia, yet the aftertaste is unmistakable — years of listening to Mogwai, Tortoise, Toe, and Do Make Say Think; that post-rock vocabulary that speaks through atmosphere rather than chorus. In the background, echoes of Saetia, 400 Years, Hot Water Music, and Appleseed Cast drift through. The title says everything: walking, talking, loving — ordinary verbs turned into mantra.
Thomas looks back on earlier projects with both humor and fatigue. “I wasted twenty years. Country bands, psychedelic stuff, and talented people, of course. I learned a lot, but mostly about how I don’t want to work today. There was always ego in the room. I tried to adapt, survive, but I lost myself. My wife always says, ‘Everything you’ve done led you here.’ She’s right. But it took a long time to feel that way.”
In feathers, he found something rare — a creative equal who listens more than he talks. “Morten pushes me, but in a good way. We challenge each other without fighting. We share the same references, the same instincts. We can build songs in layers, like a painting, but with sound. Three hours of focus, and suddenly we’ve built something that feels complete.”
The sound feels like an image found in a drawer — intimate, half-forgotten, slightly blurred. “We wanted imperfection,” Morten says. “No polish, no clarity. That’s real life, off-focus, slightly blurred. I think that’s what feathers, sounds like too.”
Trondheim’s underground is full of contradictions: talented musicians scattered across genres, never quite forming a unified scene. “There’s always been a quiet undercurrent here,” Morten says. “But you can’t wait for a scene to save you. You have to build your own corner. It’s small, but everyone still helps each other. You might not play the same style, but there’s respect.”
Beneath it all lies a quiet philosophy. No manifestos, no marketing plans — just movement. “walking, talking, loving” is a method. “It’s about staying in motion,” Morten explains. “We don’t overanalyze. We just make the next song, and the next one. The process itself is what keeps it alive.”
Thomas adds, “I used to be obsessed with control, with making things perfect. Now I know the opposite is true. You just have to let creativity breathe.” Their small Trondheim studio became a refuge — a place where noise turns to calm and decades of separate paths finally merge.
At its core, feathers is about reclamation. Two people who carried the weight of different musical lives and finally set it down long enough to create something new. The name fits — feathers, are fragile, but they carry weight through motion. “We’re both mid-forties,” Morten says. “That’s not the age most people start a new band. But this doesn’t feel like starting over. It feels like continuing a conversation we didn’t finish twenty-five years ago.”
It’s not really about art or ambition. “It’s not about chasing anything anymore,” Thomas says. “It’s about being present in sound, in friendship, in the moment when a song suddenly feels right. That’s enough for me.”
Maybe that’s what defines feathers, — it doesn’t shout, but it lingers. Like breath on a cold Tiller morning, or a photograph whose edges are curling with time.
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