Dark world music band Heilung performed the first of two sold-out rituals at the Forum in Melbourne on Saturday 4 March 2023 as part of their first Australian tour. Founded in 2014 in Copenhagen, Denmark by vocalist Kai Uwe Faust (a German tattooist who specialises in Old Norse tattoos) and Danish producer Christopher Juul, they were joined the following year by Juul’s girlfriend: singer Maria Franz. The band’s name means healing in German, and their tribal music is based on texts and runic inscriptions from Germanic peoples of the Iron Age, and Viking Age. Heilung has describe their music as “amplified history from early medieval northern Europe”.
Their music is usually about Germanic deities, The Jǫtnar, and valkyries, with references to the early ages of European Civilization made by using texts from historical artefacts and historical poems. Many items used as instruments are what were available to humans in the Iron Age, such as drums, bones or spears, and the languages include German, English, Gothic, Old High German, Icelandic, Latin, Old English, Proto-Norse, Proto-Germanic, and Viking age Old Norse. Heilung released their third studio album Drif last August, which peaked at No. 9 in the German album charts.
