SHINING

Restless. Fearless. Eccentric. Subversive. Unpredictable.

Led by saxophonist, singer, composer and producer Jørgen Munkeby, Norway’s Shining have spent more than two decades refusing to follow a straight line. Every time the world thinks it has them figured out, they mutate again.

Shining began as an acoustic jazz quartet, releasing four albums of adventurous, left-field jazz before gradually turning electric. That transformation erupted in full force on 2010’s genre-defying and genre-defining Blackjazz, which fused the volatility of free jazz with blackened industrial metal to create a ferocious new musical monster. Driven by twisted riffs, distorted vocals, shrieking saxophones and deeply progressive ideas, the album established Shining as a singular force in heavy music.

Rather than repeat their breakthrough, Shining kept moving. One One One sharpened the band’s attack into something leaner and more immediate in 2013, while 2015’s International Blackjazz Society brought the Blackjazz era to a deafening climax. Then, with 2018’s Animal, Shining reinvented themselves once again—this time as an explosive, hook-driven modern rock band. The title track has surpassed 13 million streams on Spotify, while the album increased the band’s monthly listenership tenfold.

That same disregard for musical boundaries has taken Munkeby far beyond Shining. From his early years as a composer and flautist with Norwegian electro-jazz pioneers Jaga Jazzist, he has gone on to perform with former Megadeth guitarist Marty Friedman, Danish big band Blood Sweat Drum ’n’ Bass and legendary Norwegian black metal band Emperor—as well as joining Epica onstage during their arena shows supporting Metallica. Whether singing, composing, producing, playing keyboards or blowing fire through his saxophone, Munkeby remains a unique figure in modern music.

In recent years, Shining have revisited Blackjazz through a series of selected anniversary performances, including an explosive show in front of 15,000 fans at Hellfest in 2024. But for Shining, looking back has never meant standing still.

Now comes NORTH.

An energetic and fierce experimental-metal anthem, NORTH is a salute to the ice-cold North: its darkness, its harsh winters and the defiance of those shaped by them. Beneath its imagery of fire and ice lies a song about Northern perseverance and “The Northern Way”—the stubborn, self-reliant spirit that has driven Shining from the beginning.

True to that ethos, Shining wrote the song themselves, recorded it in their own studio, mixed it themselves and travelled to their drummer’s cabin in the Norwegian mountains to shoot the official video. With distorted screams, ferocious riffs and screeching saxophones, NORTH brings the sinister intensity of the Blackjazz era crashing into the present—and points towards Shining’s forthcoming album, NORTH // SOUTH, arriving in fall 2026.

After a career built on challenging convention, tearing down boundaries and never making the same album twice, Shining remain as difficult to define as ever.

Still restless. Still fearless. Forever rebels.