Sondre Lerche has always been a romantic. Whether it be the songs he wrote as a teen for his critically acclaimed 2001 debut, Faces Down, or starring as the love-lorn Christian in the Norwegian stage production of Moulin Rouge! The Musical. In 2026, though, his love of, well, love is shot through with a kind of defiance. 

“There’s a dissonance between the increasingly dystopian world we live in and finding beauty and peace in your private life,” he says. “It feels almost like a paradox that I’m blessed to have landed in a life and a love that is very meaningful and true. And, at the same time, it feels impossible to write a love song without taking into account the unspeakable things that are happening in the world. Falling in love feels more and more like an act of defiance.”  

The result is Lerche’s 11th studio album, Acrobats, an eight-song suite that pingpongs between joy and introspection, loss and love — directly informed by his work on the stage. “Acting in a musical you have to find a way to project really big, and yet ground it in something true, which is such a challenge, especially when you’re new to it,” he says. “There's no room for subtlety. And I think that stuck with me into the process of recording Acrobats: daring to be very clear and bombastic in every choice, and rooting it in sincerity and tenderness.”  

Recorded across nine studios with a gaggle of creatives, it’s a perhaps more sobering followup up to 2022’s Avatars of Love — although no less brimming with passion. The record was preceded by his Turning Up The Heat Again EP, released earlier this year as a palette cleanser, with songs from the same sessions and cycle. 

Lerche most recently celebrated his 20-plus-year career at the Oslo Opera in 2025, where he celebrated every era of his life as a musician — from penning Faces Down and follow-up Two Way Monologue in his native town of Bergen, Norway, through the decades he spent in the States. He spent those years collecting accolades: scoring films like Dan in Real Life and The Sleepwalker, writing two children’s books and a tome of essays on music, and launching his own line of natural wines. The concert series followed Lerche returning to Norway in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, and reevaluating. In 2022, he dropped the double-album Avatars of Love, which was nominated for four Norwegian Grammy Awards and featured Aurora, Chai, Felicia Douglass of the Dirty Projectors, Mary Lattimore, Rodrigo Alarcon, and Ana Müller. Uncut Magazine praised the release, calling it "lavishly orchestrated pop from the Norwegian master craftsman. … On the heart-wrenching opener he's Jobim; on the perfect pop of ‘Cut’ he is Paddy McAloon; on the drum-less mini symphony ‘Now She Sleeps Beside Me’ he is Leonard Cohen; on the dreamily theatrical ballad ‘Alone in the Night’ he is Cole Porter." 

Following the album’s release, Lerche went out on the road, but returned spent — in need of creative rejuvenation. In the end, it was performing on a Joni Mitchell Tribute jazz tour that reawakened his spark — seeing master musicians playing night after night, conjuring music from the air like magic. “I felt like I was marveling at them,” he says. “Sometimes people ask me after a concert, ‘How much of what you did there was planned?” And I found myself asking that same question every night when I played with these musicians.” The result was the opening track on Acrobats, appropriately titled “How Much of This Was Planned?”, a techno-tinged, jazz-inspired take on musical alchemy featuring backing vocals from Marianna Sangita Røe, who also performed on the Mitchell tour. He asked her to be his vocal shadow, flitting through the song, spreading pixie dust. 

Lerche sees himself as the “curator” of the record, bringing in musician friends old and new to create delicate biomes of sound. There’s his long-time producers Matias Téllez and Kato Ådland, clarinet player Solveig Wang, saxophone player Jonas Hamre, singer Veslemøy Narvesen (who also happens to be one of Norway’s premiere jazz drummers), upright bass player Ole Morten Vågan, trombonist Emil Bø — and his longtime band: Dave Heilman on drums, Chris Holm on bass, and Alexander von Mehren on keys.  

Several of those musicians played on “Little Kids,” which Lerche says was the trickiest song he’s ever written. He had the dreamy, sepia-toned melody, but none of the words he tried to pair it with worked — until, after two years, he cracked the code at a late-night hotel. “It’s having empathy and kindness to who you were and what you were trying to achieve in seeking affirmation and love as a younger person,” he says. “And also about forgiving the person you were — and the person you were with.” Sean O'Hagan from the High Llamas arranged the strings, which were performed by Stockholm Studio Orchestra (Taylor Swift's Life of a Showgirl). 

“Drive Me Away From You” sidles in next, a bombastic tune that sees Lerche reaching new vocal heights due to his work on Moulin Rouge — and new emotional ones with lyrics like, "There’s an arrogance to being young/Every lover longs to prolong/But the greatest trick is not to jinx it.” “I wrote a lot of very romantic songs when I was younger, and then I got into more of an existential love song period,” he says. “This felt like returning to the sentiment of the flamboyant love songs that I used to write — through the eyes and experience of a man in his forties. Fuck it, this is how I feel. Love will not ask for your permission to occur.”  

That sentiment carries over into the whispery tranquility of the album’s emotional centerpiece “Love Is All,” which Lerche thinks of as “a small song.” Wang’s clarinet weaves throughout like a river through the reeds. “It depicts humans meeting or finding each other in a bar, against the backdrop of a world full of manmade disasters,” he says. “Follow the River,” then, is more of a torrent than a trickle. A nine-minute epic — which includes its own remix (ala Pet Shop Boys album Introspection) — it was inspired by a performance of Mahler’s “Symphony No. 2” that saw Lerche crying his eyes out at the Oslo Opera. “This one doesn't make excuses for being completely overcome with feelings of love and desire,” he says. “So naturally I thought, ‘I need a gospel choir on this,’ because it’s almost indulging, maybe, as an act of defiance, in the beauty of two humans finding each other, reveling in all the little, mundane moments of that.” 

The nimble title track “Acrobats” was written at Lerche’s musical homebase, the converted Oslo horse stable he made his home after returning to Norway. Much like the aural push and pull of the record, the song is about letting go and giving in, gently bending to accommodate love. As Lerche sings, "Unburdened by fear and distrust/They carry out what they discussed/On a trapeze.” “What can be so beautiful about love and about a relationship is the act of meeting someone halfway,” he says. “Stretching to make someone comfortable. All the things humans do to feel unity.” And then there’s the lilting story song “In the Time Before I Knew Her Well,” which Lerche first wrote in his dreams — then quietly in the corner while his girlfriend slept. “It emerged as a kind of Irish folk song, a story about love you tell at a pub,” he says. “It's a description of two people and the sort of the hoops and the past lives that they've gone through to arrive at this one spot in time.” That song features the Norwegian Radio Orchestra, in an arrangement by contemporary composer Eivind Buene. 

The record ends with the achingly human “Life-Changing Love.” Lerche was just trying to write a simple love song, but kept getting distracted by the news, by forever wars and disregard for human life. “So I ended up writing about the absurdity of war, and of the world we live in,” he says. The Vetle Junker-produced recording is inspired by ambient-titan William Basinski, who recently remixed one of Lerche’s tunes. “It still wants to be a love song, but one that tries to not look the other way.”  

Because, in the end, there’s no one definition of love — teenage giddiness, consuming passion, empathy, or the comfort of companionship when you dream your final dream. “If there’s one theme to this album, I suppose it is finding love in times of great unrest and hopelessness," Lerche says. And that’s precious.