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Amalie Bruun is Danish-born musician who grew up playing classical violin and piano. It didn't take long, though, before she was introduced to a more aggressive style of music, for

which the Scandinavian region is especially well known. "When I heard black metal, I always say that I couldn't really believe that something could be so ugly and so beautiful at

the same time," Bruun says. "And composition-wise, the reason black metal speaks to me is the same reason that classical music speaks to me. ... If you take a composer like

Tchaikovsky, there's absolute beauty and very fragile moments, and then there's just absolute brutality and dramatics." Bruun now performs under the name Myrkur, and in her

music she's continued to explore that contrast. Her debut album, _M_, turns on a dime from lilting, ethereal arrangements to pummeling waves of distorted guitar and screamed vocals.

"Putting this music out is an outlet for me, so when I scream, I really do it from the inside, to get something out," she says. "It actually comes almost as natural as the

other style of singing. You have to act according to certain rules, especially as a woman, and [at] some time I just decided not to, and act according to my own rules and what feels natural

to me instead of everybody else." When she spoke with NPR's Rachel Martin this week, Bruun was getting ready to play what would be Myrkur's third show ever. The venue

couldn't have been more fitting. [embedded content] "It's a mausoleum," she explains. "It's this artist, Emanuel Vigeland — he designed his own grave, and his

ashes are in there as well, I believe. And there's no windows — you know, it's a tomb — and it's dark, and there's paintings on the walls of dead people. But the beauty

of this room, besides the feeling of death, is that it has 11 seconds of natural reverb." Bruun says she found the sound in the burial chamber so alluring that she recorded her

album's vocals there — although for live performance, it does mean turning down the volume a bit. Hear more of her conversation with Rachel Martin, including her thoughts on how women

in metal are (and are not) recognized, at the audio link. Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.