All shall be Charity: Susanne Sundfør at Bergen Domkirke

12 October 2026

She emerges from a side door as an apparition, dressed in a full-length veil, glides across the altar, performs a right-angle turn and shuffles off down the aisle. Fifty-six minutes later, as the crowd breaks into applause that runs and runs, she leaves the church by some clandestine route. Between those moments, we don’t see her once, nor does she speak, save to recite the two spoken-word pieces that bookend this current album. Yet in those 56 minutes, lives are changed. Mine, for a start.

Sundfør is touring her latest record, Revelations of Divine Love. I say “touring”: she is playing six dates in Norway, mostly in churches. I say “her latest record”: the former (and, to many, still reigning) electro-pop dance queen has just released a musical adaptation of a 14th century mystical religious text with impeccable feminist credentials. In a review of her Piknik i Parken set last summer, I observed that no-one else was doing anything even remotely like Sundfør, and such faith in her singularity has been repaid. A month after tonight’s full-frontal spiritual assault, she will be reimagining her back catalogue in a bluegrass vein. Then she might – at last, and no promises – venture outside Scandinavia for the first time since 2018.

Revelations is, as Sundfør said when we chatted last month, the continuation of the work she began with her two, astounding ‘church shows’ in 2024. She and organist Kit Downes reworked six of her songs into an organ-and-voice suite (then added ‘blómi’) as an encore, with the Tonsberg show in particular ranking among the five or six greatest concerts I’ve ever seen. If, indeed, “seen” is the word: in one of her characteristic artistic gambles, Sundfør performed the show from the organ loft, behind her audience. During the concerts, she described her concept as “perhaps dogmatic” – intending for audiences to meditate on the spiritual setting in which they found themselves.

In our recent interview, she added that there was also a practical reason: “I need to hear the organ – Kit needs to cue me.” Looking ahead to these 2026 church shows, she added: “We’ve discussed it quite a bit with the LD who’ll be on tour with us: we’re gonna have to get a bit creative about the lights and see what we come up with.”

What they came up with was a series of shifting, translucent white blobs, forming and reforming like cell mutations as they crawled across the grey stone and stained glass of Bergen Domkirke (Cathedral), a simple and beautiful space only slightly overshadowed by its near neighbour: the utterly glorious Holy Cross, the oldest church in the city, recently restored. The animations, which occasionally suggested the silhouette of Sid from the Ice Age films making an unexpected appearance in the Julian of Norwich Musical Universe, were as much state-of-the-art stagecraft and the modern world as we got – or wanted.

Instead, the show was a showcase for simply the greatest voice I’ve ever heard, lifted to the heavens – or else diverted from them in some masterclass of anchoring or delayed gratification – by Downes’ emotionally and musically labyrinthine worldbuilding. (“A wizard,” Sundfør has called him.) It was also, and I will get to this, a profoundly spiritual experience that gave me a feeling I have sought for 20-plus years, perhaps without even knowing it, and that came to me when Sundfør sang ‘The Blessed Wounds’.

She enters, as I mentioned, like a badass, perhaps inhabiting Julian, perhaps Julian’s ghost. Then she plays the record in full. Then she leaves. I have seen her do something similar once before: at the Barbican in 2018, when Music for People in Trouble AV lifted us to the mountain tops before soundblasting us against the wall. As I said last summer, she can reconfigure her past to meet the moment, yet she doesn’t need to rely on a setlist for sublimity or surprise. She is an artist who (like Sandy Denny) has never sung a line the same way twice, and isn’t about to start now.

The highlights here are legion. Sundfør joked in our interview that, in order to build the home studio she wants, she would have to write a “monster hit”. ‘I It Am’, the lead single of Revelations (if indeed the album can be said to feature a lead single), shows that her facility for writing catchy melodies, to which she gave full flight on her greatest record, Ten Love Songs, is running as smoothly as ever – and can be turned as easily to church music as to dance music. Live, the purity of the vocal is breathtaking, shifting with insouciant ease from a chest voice of almost limitless power to a head voice of flute-like timbre, which here goes racing around the octaves, flowing up flights of notes and their attendant nuances of meaning that don’t exist on the vinyl. “I it am that is highest,” she sings, and suddenly “highest” has five syllables, each higher than the last. She even, towards the song’s close, allows her vocal to crackle and fry, investing the song’s pay-off with not just its feeling of closure and contentment but a kind of languid sensuality. Then the show moves into harder territory: melodically, psychologically.

Instrumentalism has always played a part in Sundfør’s story (she has a whole wordless live album to her name), and when she played the Barbican, her band members would break out during most songs into flurries of offbeat, borderline atonal avant garde jazz, with even her immortal Undercover segueing from its familiar, Heaven-scraping denouement into a lengthy, syncopated double-bass solo. Tonight’s show is 16 minutes longer than its record, which gives Downes space to expand. His musical linkings can be formidably intellectual but at other times he is just showing what an organ can do: the rumble that can shake a cathedral floor (in his thunderous opening to ‘Vision’, which spins from apocalyptic to spinetingling), but also the doom into which this second most godly of instruments can tip you; the door it can open, above or below.

Sundfør’s voice can take you absolutely anywhere, though tonight it is heading in only one direction. When the two musicians duel on ‘What Are We’, Downes’ accompaniment sounding like a cross between the breath of an angel and an organ playing by itself in a ‘30s horror, her voice provides the human solace – and that human touched by God. In ‘One High Love’, she mixes hymn-like simplicity with the uncertainty of unresolved melody, before plunging into her devastating, metallic middle-range, perhaps her strangest vocal gift. ‘Overcome’ is the song most transformed live, a jawdropping vehicle for that voice: yes, the breath control, the power, the sheer range, but more those less tangible virtues: deep feeling, the ability to transport the listener to some other plane of memory or fantasy, and an innovation in real time that feels awfully like genius. “Thou shalt not be overcome,” she wails, in a half-dozen different ways, religion as rebellion. Then, without a pause, she slips into ‘The Blessed Wounds’. With her stand-alone single, ‘When the Lord’ (2020), it is the greatest of the songs she’s written since 2017’s ‘Mountaineers’. It was the highlight of her Trondheim show earlier this year, and in its own way it is again tonight: a beguiling creation full of that instant transcendence that Sundfør can conjure out of thin air. There are notes here that I swear I’ve never heard before, exploding around us like dying stars. And there is something that I feel.

After another instrumental (‘Seven Nights Dead’, which sounds like an old Celtic folk song being stretched on the rack), she crafts two climactic numbers that are nothing short of astonishing: ‘Charity’ and ‘All Shall Be Well’. And don’t we all crave those two things? To feel charity, within us and without us; to experience serenity within this world’s negativity loop, or inside a body fighting against itself? For me, at that moment, those were the two wounds I most needed salving.

Then, in ‘Charity’, the unthinkable happens – that voice, a deceptively sensitive instrument that can require a 24-hour hiatus if it goes full Undercover, yet has aced every death-defying public feat it’s ever attempted, goes for a high-ish note and cracks. But like a staged Cirque du Soleil near-miss or a later Tom Cruise M:I stunt (Sundfør did, of course, sing the theme tune to the star’s 2013 vehicle, Oblivion), it serves only to underline how high and thin the tightrope this most ambitious of artists skips along as soon as breathing. That moment of peril is followed by one of the most astounding things I’ve witnessed in my 42 years on this earth, as she starts to climb the octaves, summoning the communal power from the room, slipping into her ‘Sound of War’ drone, and then suddenly blasting into St Peter’s sight, hitting far higher notes than the one she’d only just caught, before hoisting herself up into Heaven, slipping into whistle-tone and tearing at the thin layer between that world and this.

“Bravura” barely describes it, nor the version of ‘All Shall Be Well’ that follows. It is the closest the album has to an anthem, the most reassuring and universal mantra it has to offer, the song most revolutionary in concept, most at war with the modern world and the way we are asked to interpret it. Live, her voice, her recurrent reinvention of melody, each song new every time, drags you repeatedly out of your temporal, temporary body, and lets you live wherever your soul can travel. Here, that’s awfully far. As she did with ‘Mountaineers’ at the Barbican, Sundfør doesn’t so much leave you on a note of optimism as grab you by your lapels and wrench you skywards, not stopping until the mundanities and compromises of earthly life have turned to sepia and you’re left wondering how to get these angel feathers and harp strings out of your hair.

From the instant she stepped out, to the moment the last notes of the closing spoken word number recede, there has been pin-drop silence. Now there is only applause. But like Elvis or Dylan before her, Susanne Sundfør has, while the lights were still off, left the building. The cathedral, in this instance.

One memory means more to me than all these others. During ‘The Blessed Wounds’, Downes plays the second half a little fast for my taste – faster, at least, than Sundfør did in Trondheim in February. Or perhaps it’s just that my heart is beating faster. During the song’s first chorus, I experience something profound and spiritual that is so deeply personal I have told only my partner – and there it stays.

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(Credit: Alaina Darling)

Setlist:

1. A Revelation Of Love (spoken word)
2. I It Am
3. For He Standeth All Alone
4. Hazelnut (organ only)
5. What Are We
6. One High Love
7. Vision (organ only)
8. Overcome
9. The Blessed Wounds
10. Seven Nights Dead (organ only)
11. Charity
12. All Shall Be Well
13. Love Was Our Lord's Meaning (spoken word)

6. Tobacco spitting must not take place in the Church.

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Thanks for reading.