Welcome to another Music Monday post. This week’s music is by Danish composer, Jesper Kyd, from the soundtrack to Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla.

As you may already have picked up from these Music Monday posts, I am an absolute sucker for the music from the Assassin’s Creed games and that, I have to admit, is largely Jesper Kyd’s fault. I found his music on Spotify quite by accident and from his soundtrack to AC: II, I gradually branched out across the rest of the games and, eventually, branched out into actually playing the games! I was, initially, a bit disappointed that Kyd only did the soundtracks for the first three-and-a-bit games (although his leaving the franchise did mean I got to know several other awesome composers – more on them in due course!), so you can imagine how excited I was when it was announced he was back for AC: Valhalla…

…and I wasn’t disappointed. It’s a brilliantly evocative soundtrack that he and his co-composers have created. (Seriously, go check it out!)

Kingdom of Wessex was one of the pieces that was released in advance of the main album and it’s a great swoop of music that builds up in layers of percussion, strings, woodwind and then voices (though not lyrics, as such) before dying away into ghostly echoes. Basically, it has every ingredient that I adore in a musical composition, combined up into a perfect three and a half minutes. It really doesn’t get any better than this!

Writing Valkyrie, this became the theme for Kari’s childhood. It made (and makes!) me think of a small community, on a windswept coast or marsh and it helped me considerably to get the sense of place I needed for that section of the book.

The Elsehere Soundtrack on Spotify has been updated to add this in.

That’s all for now. Happy reading and listening!