Oslo’s Feral Nature don’t mess around with half-measures. Their new video for “Cradle of Twigs & Bone” ditches the safety of studio performance for something stranger and more unnerving—a Nordic folk horror trip that feels less like a music video and more like watching someone’s psyche come unspooled in the frozen wilderness.
Photos by Thomas Moe Ellefsrud / @hellrideer
The visuals pull from Baba Yaga folklore, but vocalist Selma Bahner frames it as something more unsettling: a descent into the unconscious disguised as a forest walk. “The protagonist’s journey unfolds as a descent into her own unconscious, visually articulated as a movement deeper into the forest,” she explains. “Alternatively understood as a passage through her own synaptic landscape.” It’s heavy-handed occult imagery—crow-adorned figures, ceremonial staging, bodies submerged in dark water—but there’s intention behind it. The forest becomes a teacher, demanding attention and surrender rather than conquest.
Bassist William Morris handled the video direction, keeping things defiantly analog in an era where AI shortcuts tempt everyone. “We also hate AI, so we did things the old fashioned way trekking through the woods with homemade costumes, props and cameras,” he says. The reference points were Robert Eggers’ The VVitch for atmosphere and Ari Aster’s Midsommar for that destabilizing dream logic where you’re never sure what’s hallucination and what’s ritual.
The song itself—off their new EP of the same name—churns through metallic hardcore with Refused’s atonal tension but pushes into darker thematic territory. Lyrics like “In the cradle of twigs and bone / Woods that sang in muted tones” read like incantations, while the song pivots between crushing breakdowns and moments of near-meditative restraint. “No mercy will come / No peace will find / The man who sold his soul to pride,” Bahner screams over grinding riffs that sound like tectonic plates shifting.
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This is the band’s follow-up to 2024’s Rituals EP, and guitarist Robert C.A. Hamilton sees it as a clearer expression of who they’ve become. “A few of the ideas are older than the band itself, but the result is something only possible when the four of us put our efforts together,” he notes. The EP was engineered and mixed by Hamilton at Eureka Soundworks and mastered by Brad Boatright at Audiosiege—the usual quality assurance for bands operating in this weight class.
Since their 2022 debut show opening for END, Feral Nature have moved fast: festivals including Inferno, Desertfest, and Øyafestival, shows across Scandinavia and Iceland, and a sold-out Oslo release show for Rituals. They’ve already caught BBC Radio’s Daniel P. Carter’s ear and secured booking through Atonal Agency’s John Niblock.
The video works because it doesn’t explain itself. No narrative hand-holding, no tidy resolution—just bodies moving through cold landscapes, hands pressed against stone, figures emerging from water like something summoned rather than filmed. “The video thus frames nature not as something ‘other than’ us, but as an active teaching force,” Bahner says. “One that demands attention, humility, and listening.”
Most bands slap on corpse paint and call it mysticism. Feral Nature are actually wrestling with something—using Baba Yaga and Nordic ritual not as decoration but as a way to articulate what it feels like when the modern world empties you out. The forest in this video isn’t scenery. It’s where you go when you’ve had enough of the noise, when you need something that predates algorithms and attention economies. It’s the older thing, the one that doesn’t care if you understand it or not.
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The new EP dropped February 4, and the band are immediately hitting the road with Celestial Scourge for a Scandinavian run. “We’ve been wanting to do something with our friends in Celestial Scourge for a long time,” Hamilton explains. “There might be a seemingly big difference between our styles, but we appreciate each other’s ability to write riffs that make a crowd move.” The tour kicks off February 11 in Oslo at Goldie, then moves through Gothenburg, Aarhus, and Aalborg with support from Sweden’s Obstruktion and Denmark’s Sewer Haul.
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