Penn: a self immolation ritual and Wardruna, World Tour 2025 review

So, I recently got another lesson in believing people when they tell you who they are, and found myself pushed out of yet another religious community over principles. This was the community run by the person I've been describing as my mentor. She'd asked me, in that context, for a creative project based on a myth in our shared religious context. I'd been working on a poem for it. Instead I sent her the attached essay/ritual to double as my creative project and my resignation.

Oh, and one more thing:

Wardruna, World Tour 2025 – Kodak Center Theater, Rochester, NY September 23, 2025

I saw Wardruna on Tuesday. They’re a Norwegian folk act that aren’t quite metal, in any ontological way, but their fanbase is all goths, vikings and metalheads. They are obnoxiously popular in the Norse Pagan crowd, made all the more annoying by the fact that they’re undeniably interesting, and even worse, good at it. I don’t half like them, I’m just a little grumpy about that fact. But Anna Rose is a big fan, and it was, by all accounts, going to be just shy of a ritual in its own right. So, I was going to be in a room with a -lot- of Heathens.

But I’d just set myself on fire. I was literally putting final touches on the self portrait in that essay when El dragged me away from my computer to go to the show. I only figured out how I was going to play it when El and I were negotiating the merch line–we both wanted the same shirt, one with a dire wolf print. I found myself feeling absolutely unreasonable, here. I just really didn’t want to budge off that pick. Fenris has never been a god in my life, in the sense that I worship him, but he’s always been a protective force for me, since well before I had a name for him. The emotion struck me–it’s when I realized I was approaching this concert as a Heathen. It could be my goodbye; one last thing to celebrate everything that identity had been for me in the nearly twenty years I wore it, as I let the word burn to ash. I do love a good formal turning point.

The show was, of course, great. Wardruna spent years developing a dark ambient thing in three albums worth of songs that intoned the runes. American Heathens collectively lost their shit about this, and rightly so, it’s neat shit–but a couple records ago they upped their energy level and discovered the pop hook. They’re secretly a very high tech band, under the hood, pairing their viking horns and handmade tagelharp with a synth guy carefully hidden in the back of the stage for synth pad swells and the requisite samples of things like crows and wolves. Not to mention, we’re pretty sure that tagelharp has some overdrive on it. 

They also had some of the most sophisticated light use I’ve seen at a live show. One thing they liked doing, and did repeatedly across the show, was to use stark lighting to cast the shadow of whoever was playing an important instrumental part on the back wall of the stage, that they’d hung white lace fabric on. These guys were masterful at silhouette in the general case–people who weren’t currently doing a thing had a tendency to stay completely still–and the soloist for the first one of these looked the part of any metal guy, except instead of an excessively angular electric guitar he was shredding on a moraharpa–a kind of keyed, bowed instrument with a drone. He looked really fucking cool on it. Then the horn guy comes in with this very long horn with the most dramatic shadow imaginable. They pull this trick a couple more times, until one song where it slowly becomes clear that it’s a video of a shadow that’s being cast behind the singer. It’s the same choreography, but it naturally and subtly goes out of phase as the song goes on. I spent the rest of the show doubting every single shadow, and they were absolutely not done playing with me on that front. 

My second highlight came at the song “Tyr.” Now, I have mentioned my problems with Tyr as he is worshipped in the American Norse pagan context. These guys are decidedly not American Heathens, and in fact, if you look at the lyrics to “Tyr” it’s not actually venerating him so much as just describing him in an increasingly horrified way. The band gets a complete pass on my judgement on that front. The drunk Heathen (oh, but I repeat myself) behind me who yelled out “HAIL TYR!” as the song ended? He gets nothing but my ire, and my only regret is that I didn’t realize I was going to counter with an irritated “hail Fenris” until it was already out of my mouth, and I didn’t say it nearly loud enough. That’s okay, if I understand the American Heathen Official Orthodoxy™ correctly, I’m pretty sure I still gave all the Heathens in that arena Wolf Cooties.

As the guy who once gave a whole Southern Baptist congregation Lesbo Cooties, I feel like there is really no more apt way for me to leave this part of my life behind.

Perfect for: Bye bye bitch.

–Penn 🔥