There are records that feel like rooms you walk into; this one feels like a shore. A departure point. A stretch of sand still warm from someone who just stood there, watching a sail shrink into the evening. Ensamseglaren (“the lone sailor / the lonely sailor”) arrives like a message in a bottle - except the bottle explodes as soon as you uncork it, releasing twelve musicians who have clearly decided that tenderness and ferocity aren’t opposites but two sides of the same hull.

Högberg pressed pause on her flagship band some years ago, trading the frantic pulse of touring for the no-less-frantic world of nursing. Maybe that’s why this return lands so hard: she comes back wielding a double sextet like a rescue crew, with brass and reeds that don’t just announce grief - they metabolise it. The ensemble behaves like an unruly organism, all lungs and claws and sudden leaps of light. This is music that mourns by overflowing.

You can hear the autobiographical anchor in the suite’s dedication to her father, the “solo sailor” immortalised on the cover. But the music doesn’t cling to sentimentality; instead it surges forward, churning personal loss into collective propulsion. The horns radiate the feeling of trying to keep your balance on a deck that won’t stop pitching. The turntables add small fissures in the surface - glitches of memory, scratches of something unrepairable. Two drummers keep shifting the ground like tides that haven’t made up their mind.

Moments of quiet arrive like fog: breathy harmonics, almost-whispers from the reeds, delicate friction from the saws that seem to trace the outlines of someone no longer there. Then, without warning, the whole ensemble ignites, blaring with the ecstatic certainty of creatures who refuse to let sorrow stay still. There’s humour here, too - the kind that sneaks in through the side door when everyone is trying not to cry. A trumpet squeaks at the wrong moment, a turntable hiccups, and suddenly the whole scene feels human again.

If the suite has a thesis, it might be this: grief is not a straight line but a coastline - sharp, curved, interrupted by inlets and cliffs, shaped by forces we can’t command. Högberg seems to know something about holding contradictions: the music is stormy but warm, monumental but porous, mournful yet bursting with the desire to live harder, louder, together.

By the time the final movement fades, the imaginary boat has vanished into the horizon. But you don’t feel abandoned. Instead, you feel like someone on another beach has already caught sight of it, waving, ready to welcome it home. And in that strange relay between shores - between the living and the gone, between players and listeners - Ensamseglaren becomes less a suite and more a rite of passage: salty, bracing, strangely comforting.

It’s a big-band elegy for people who can’t sit still; a farewell that refuses to whisper; a reminder that even the loneliest voyage leaves a wake luminous enough for others to follow.