Unless you’re a musical loving Dane, there’s every chance that you’ve never heard of Hymns from Nineveh. Predominantly the work of one man alone, the Denmark based Jonas Petersen, his project has received fairly significant attention in his homeland. An earlier EP, Uncomplicated Christmassongs, received a good deal of national radio airplay; his self-titled debut album briefly topped the Danish iTunes chart and also collected a long line of positive reviews along the way; and Petersen even had a song included on the soundtrack of a Danish Christmas film. Yet it seems that barely a word about the artist or his music has made it onto UK shores, and that’s a real shame as Hymns from Nineveh has a lot to offer.

From the first few seconds of album opener ‘So Mournful The Elegy, So Comforting The Hymn’, through the lightly tapped keys of the piano and the stunningly frail vocals, you immediately get the sense of the type of album this is going to be: delicate, tender, and downright beautiful. It’s folk music, to put it simply, but so much more than your average collection of folk songs.

It’s perhaps the very start of the album that sums up the whole of the record the best, both in the opening song’s naming (the record has a highly emotive and often melancholy feel to it, yet is entirely wholesome and comforting) and its sound. The song builds from vocals and piano alone to eventually become – layer by layer – this hearty, swelled sound containing multiple vocal layers, acoustic guitar, piano, flute, drums, and violin. Although tracks often take this route of growing from minimal finger-plucked acoustic guitar or delicately caressed piano to something much larger and louder with a number of different instruments making appearances, they never feel cluttered, clumsy, or crowded. Instead, these are wonderfully crafted songs of which one can only assume is put together by someone incredibly skilled at orchestrating songs on both a lesser and greater scale.

The fact that songs often build to have so many layers also means that Hymns from Nineveh is a very ‘listenable’ album; that you could play it twenty times over and still notice something brilliant and entirely new to you. Whether it be the subtle yet beautiful and wonderfully effective self-harmonised vocal moments on ‘Cocoon’, or the quirky and unusual wobbling high-pitched background noise on ‘Sister Sorrowsong’, it’s a record that never stops giving.

Vocally, Petersen often self-harmonises, or self-backs his own vocals to stunning effect through a kind of sampling method on a number of songs. It’s these different vocal methods that bring to mind the two most comparable musical acts of Hymns from Nineveh in Bon Iver and Dirty Projectors, which Petersen’s project could be said to be the meeting place of – the delicate, melancholy folk of Justin Vernon’s music combined with the sometimes experimental pop nature of Dave Longstreath et al.

As well as being vocally and structurally delightful, the album is technically brilliant in its instrumentation also. The finger-plucked acoustic guitar is so consistently wowing that it can at times go unnoticed, and everything happens at just the right time and levels that it should. An album that is at times so big and impressive, yet it never even goes close to coming off as boastful. It’s the kind of album that demands respect and deserves to be listened to in complete silence. It’s also the kind of record that suits late night listens, and you can easily imagining shedding tears at its raw beauty.

For those who look for music to grip you by the shoulders and shake you silly, this isn’t for you. But for those wanting their music to be delicate, artistically beautiful, and emotionally affecting should look no further than Hymns from Nineveh.