The music of Minru captures the glow of the morning sun warming up the forest, and wraps its listeners in a feeling that will stay with them as they walk around the world. Her blend of folk and indie rock sounds like music woven from light and shadow, with the interplay between them casting dancing patterns as the songs come to life. It wakes something in the listener, the rare sense of experiencing something musically special that makes the noise outside the song fade away, and leaves you immersed in its magical world. 

Minru is the project of Caroline Blomqvist, a musician from Gothenburg, and music came into her life when she picked up a guitar as a kid and became obsessed with learning to play it, even skipping school to spend extra hours mastering the instrument. After playing around in a few bands in her hometown in her teens, she moved to Berlin, and it was in the German capital that music took a step up in seriousness for her, as she became a guitarist in different bands and toured across the country. After a while, she began to feel the urge to express herself musically and find an outlet for her own songs, and that made for the beginnings of Minru. 

In 2022, she released the first Minru album, Liminality, a blend of winding layers of acoustic guitar, piano and strings, moving testaments to grief and loss, a dreamlike actualisation of wandering lost between those heavy feelings. 

After a long stretch in Berlin, Blomqvist recently relocated back home to Gothenburg, and her new record, Thin Places, started to take root on a winter trip to the Swedish wilderness. Having decamped to a cabin in the woods to get a break from hectic city life, she started to play around with songs, and those songs grew into Thin Places. What it shares with Liminality is her ability to draw the emotional nuance and force of music from subtlety, of presence in small touches and details, of saying more with a whisper than most songs do with a roar. Where it departs is in the level of intimacy - she’s still painting with broad soundscapes, but Thin Places is so stripped back and raw that it moves on from folk music to something even more silvery, evolving into music that’s hypnotic and almost hymnal. 

Liminality set out an artistic signature for the Minru project, and on Thin Places, she sharpens and defines her sound and her space. While it may not be typical for an artist to strip back their sound on a sophomore album - the direction of travel usually runs the other way - the vision and creativity that drives Minru doesn't lose anything from being open and exposed. Instead, the heart and soul of the songs only grows stronger from letting the listeners get close to them - something that shows the power of the project, and the wide open possibilities of where she might go next.

- Austin Maloney