THE LAST KINGDOM: DESTINY IS ALL - SINGLE RELEASE THE BELOVED

There is a brand-new album from the world of the massively popular Netflix Viking series The Last Kingdom on the way, with a new single and video out today. The Last Kingdom: Destiny Is All will be released digitally and physically on April 22nd (Record Store Day) and was newly created and co-composed by Emmy-winning, classically trained Scottish composer John Lunn (Downton Abbey, The White Queen), Faroese singer-songwriter and Icelandic Music Prize-winner Eivør, and composer Danny Saul (The Last Kingdom, NBC’s Law and Order: Organized Crime, Shetland, Jamestown). The album will follow the premiere of the newly announced The Last Kingdom feature-length movie Seven Kings Must Die, airing on Netflix on April 14th as a follow-up to the final season.

The Last Kingdom is one of the Top 20 most globally streamed series with 10.4 billion streams and the music from the series has more than 22 million global streams to date.

The album features the distinct, singular voice of Eivør, acclaimed for her otherworldly throat singing which
can be heard as the only vocals throughout the entirety of the score of The Last Kingdom series (which she
also co-composed in its entirety along with Lunn) and on her own nine acclaimed albums. Eivør and Lunn, along with Saul who began scoring the series during Season 3, evolved the musical cues in The Last Kingdom’s score from Season 4, Season 5, and the upcoming film into full-fledged, newly recorded songs rooted in the epic scenes and emotional storylines.

With Eivør’s ominously chanted vocals, primal drumming and serpentine synth lines, “The Beloveds” is a slow-building, moody, and gloriously frenetic track based on the opening scene of the final season (Season 5,
Episode 1) which brings a highly charged moment in which a rogue female Viking named Brida (now a mother) and her daughter (the Seer Vibeke) hold a ritual sacrifice to appease The Gods and prepare for battle—a scene in which Eivør and Saul made a cameo as members of Brida’s tribe, leading the chants with her famous Nordic drum.

(John Lunn & Eivør - photo credit Rachel DiBiaso)

“The three of us took the material we’d made for the show and turned those pieces into proper songs, and ended up with something that goes beyond a typical soundtrack album,” shares Lunn. “On the show there’s a lot of epic battles and other moments you’d normally associate with orchestral music, but I wanted to do something new and different and focus on electronic instruments,” says Lunn. “As I was beginning work on the series, I was looking for something to accompany that and saw a video of Eivør and her extraordinary throat singing, and she completely captured the energy that The Last Kingdom required. The Last Kingdom score IS Eivør; without Eivør there would be no unique score.”

The lyrics are inspired by Nordic mythology and chanted vocals informed by Eivør’s roots in Faroese folk
music. Eivør has always been enchanted with the dramatic landscape of old Nordic sagas.

“Those chants are very much a big part of my culture; it’s something I remember hearing my grandfather doing when I was younger,” says Eivør. “Growing up in the Faroe Islands, I was always fascinated with the Vikings, so The Last Kingdom feels very close to my heart. Our initial idea was for all the actors to sing the chant along with me, which meant I had to teach everyone to sing in Faroese. That was quite a challenge, but it was so powerful to be there with everyone with warpaint on our faces—it really felt like we were in ancient times.” Adds Saul, “Eivør and I met in person for the first time on The Last Kingdom set, and two days later we were teaching 100 battle-bloodied Vikings a Faroese chant. Working on the show I think we tend to inhabit that world mentally for many months on end, so finally stepping onto the actual set and being in that world with those characters was a surreal, larger-than-life experience.”

As heard throughout The Last Kingdom’s five-season run—and on The Last Kingdom (Original Television
Soundtrack), a 2018 release featuring music from the show’s first three seasons—Lunn, Saul, and Eivør’s
charmed collaboration has continually defied all sonic convention. Since first joining forces to work on music
for The Last Kingdom in 2015, John and Eivør’s rare magical chemistry and genre-warping artistry has enabled them to dream up a darkly hypnotic sound that draws from their vast imagination and sophisticated musicianship -interestingly opting for electronic sonics and analog synths rather than orchestral sounds. Last year, “The Last Kingdom: Blood Will Prevail” - another track that will appear on the album - was released.

Over the course of its 11 riveting tracks—including all-new recordings and stunningly reimagined
arrangements of two essential tracks, “Lívstræðrir II” and the theme title “The Last Kingdom: Slight Return”
—The Last Kingdom: Destiny Is All radiates a raw emotionality that ultimately transcends the confines of the
series. Eivør, Lunn and Saul’s creative kinship transforms The Last Kingdom’s themes of destiny, love, loss,
politics, and war into music that thrills fans of the series and transcends beyond it, offering a powerful
listening experience for all that is rooted in the human experience.

(John Lunn, Eivør, & Danny Saul - photo credit Rachel DiBiaso)