Limelight
The nihilistic Norwegians with prog rock running in their blood.
AVKRVST’S NAME IS pronounced“Aw-crust”. Don’t worry if you ever get that wrong, though: the band have made the same mistake as well.
“We pronounced the first V at first,” singer and multiinstrumentalist Simon Bergseth admits to Prog.“We used to say‘Av-crust’, but the band are named after a guy called Kjell Aukrust – we just swapped the‘U’s for the letter‘V’. Other bands have been doing that for ages.”
Kjell Aukrust was a Norwegian poet and artist. The reason the band named themselves after him is that he had the same hometown as they do, Alvdal. Bergseth and AVKRVST’s other co-founder, drummer and synth player Martin Utby, grew up there together, then reunited in the same town to make what would become their debut album, The Approbation.
“Martin’s dad is my dad’s best friend,” Bergseth says. “We grew up with them playing in their prog bands. Martin always had this loft with drums and guitar amps and everything. So, every time my dad and I went there, Martin and I played together. We thought, ‘When we get older, we should start a band.’”
Bergseth and Utby were seven years old when they made that pact, but didn’t form AVKRVST until 2021. “My better half was pregnant at the time,” remembers Bergseth.“Martin and I went to my grandparents’ cabin [in Alvdal], just to relax. Through the night, we figured out,‘Maybe now is the right time.’”
Every second of The Approbation was written and recorded in that cabin. Although the album is the sound of Bergseth and Utby following their fathers by playing prog, it’s more indebted to the genre idols of their youth
