Badlands – also known as transboundary Swedish producer, composer and sound designer Catharina Jaunviksna – will release her highly anticipated album Nobody Dies(RITE). The collection of lo-fi ballads was inspired by a longing for human primitive musicality and embraces a raw sound using old string instruments and electronic scrap; thus exploring our need for authentic expression and synergy in a new, fragmented world.

Ahead of the release, today Badlands shared the final glimpse into the project with the haunting single  + video, “The Dead.” The track unfolds in layers of textured sound and instrumentation, gradually building as Catharina’s expansive vocals trace a poignant narrative of war – and the transformation it leaves in its wake. She says, “‘The Dead’ is about human sacrifice in war and warlike circumstances, and who you are/become and what responsibility you carry as a witness to such events.”

Badlands’ 2022 release, Call to Love, was an immensely personal body of work full of juxtapositions, at once both meditative and restless, dreamy yet carnal — oftentimes within the same song — the way that love tends to be. In 2023, a special remix version, Call to Love: Rendered, was released featuring remixes by Art Feynman, Ikonika, Odd Nosdam, Lost Under Heaven and Cooly G amongst others.

Now Catharina Jaunviksna’s fourth album as Badlands expands her solo project into a suite of cracked folk-ambient songforms, binding voice, detuned strings, and salvaged electronics into a meta-fictional drift. Nobody Dies plays like a séance of fractured ballads and spectral atmospheres, somewhere between dream-pop haze and post-apocalyptic ritual. Guest presences from Maggie Björklund (Jack White, Mark Lanegan) on pedal steel and folklorist Ida Mitchell on cello lend haunted textures, while collage artist  OSKARP folds the visuals into its blur of fiction and memory. Sitting in a lineage from Broadcast and  Grouper to Carla dal Forno and the wyrd folk of England’s Hidden Reverse, it’s a singular zone — lo-fi storytelling and occult drift for fractured times.

Catharina expands, “‘Nobody Dies’ is about war, delusion, resilience and what it means to be human. It tells the story of a character in a broken landscape who is forced to invent and ascribe new meaning to things in order to endure existence and sow new hope.” She continues, “It’s a comment on the current state of the world and where we are heading, about deception, but also about making the best with what you got. It’s about the importance of art and human interaction, and the striving to find a way, even at times when everything seems hopeless (and even if that sometimes means delusion).”

Jaunviksna has been operating under the moniker of Badlands since 2011, under which she makes lush tracks from a wide palette of inspiration; stretching from post-punk, folk and ambient scapes, to electro, dub and gritty techno working with analog electronics, sampling & organic orchestration. She’s the founder of the imprint and production company RITE based in the legendary Tambourine Studios in Malmö, Sweden; her platform for making transboundary arts and documentary, original music and sound design for film and theater, as well as production for and collaborations with other labels and artists.