The coastal Sámi artist brings joik, family memory and the multilingual landscape of Omasvuotna Omasvuono Storfjord into a contemporary meeting of pop and folk, released by By Norse Music on 25 September.
A debut shaped by coast borders and language
Emil Kárlsen’s first solo album, Nannámii, arrives on 25 September via By Norse Music. Its title can be understood as ‘towards the shore’ or ‘towards firm ground’: an apt image for a record concerned with orientation, return and the ways in which music can reconnect a person with language, family and place. Kárlsen was born and raised in Omasvuotna/Omasvuono/Storfjord, a multilingual coastal community in Northern Norway, close to the borders with Sweden and Finland. That geography is not simply the album’s backdrop. It is part of its vocabulary and emotional architecture.
Contemporary songs older joiks
Nannámii brings together contemporary pop and folk writing with older joiks, Sámi terminology and stories held within Kárlsen’s family. Rather than placing tradition behind glass, the album treats it as a living practice: something that can be inherited, questioned and carried into a new musical setting. The result promises to speak both from a particular coastal Sámi experience and to wider questions of belonging — especially what it means to recover cultural knowledge after generations of Norwegianisation.
The personal voice of Hokkis vilba
The final single released before the album, ‘Hokkis-vilba’, is based on the personal luohti, or joik, of Kárlsen’s cousin Hokkis. Its intimate starting point offers a glimpse of the album’s wider method, in which family relationships and named individuals become part of the music’s living social world. Kárlsen’s work does not present joik as an ornamental sound added to pop; it asks listeners to approach it as a form with its own histories, relationships and meanings.
A multilingual homecoming
Storfjord’s Norwegian, Northern Sámi and Kven names — Storfjord, Omasvuotna and Omasvuono — reveal a region where languages and identities meet. Kárlsen grew up in a part of the Sámi community profoundly affected by assimilation, and his artistic practice has become one route back towards words, sounds and traditions that were made harder to inherit. In that context, Nannámii’s movement ‘towards firm ground’ is not a simple return to an untouched past. It is a contemporary act of reconstruction, made through listening, learning and creation.
From Omasvuotna to a wider Nordic audience
Kárlsen is already known as a singer, songwriter, musician and actor, and for work that carries coastal Sámi culture into present-day performance. With Nannámii, he brings those strands together in a solo statement intended for audiences well beyond his home region. A pre-release acoustic mini-concert and signing is scheduled in Tromsø on 24 September, before the album appears through By Norse Music the following day. For listeners interested in the living cultures of Norwegian Lapland, this is a release to approach not as a generic evocation of ‘the North’, but as a voice grounded in a specific coast, community and family history.
Release information
Nannámii by Emil Kárlsen is released on 25 September 2026 via By Norse Music, in digital, CD and vinyl formats. ‘Hokkis-vilba’ is available now.
Suggested Online Sources
By Norse Music announcement and Hokkis vilba release
