The Norwegian piano trio In the Country had recorded four albums before teaming up with acclaimed singer Solveig Slettahjell and guitarist Knut Reiersrud for a 2014 Berlin gig, released the same year as Norwegian Woods, quickly followed by studio collaboration Trail of Souls (2015). Now they add Sidsel Endresen’s adventurous voice to recite poems by the Brontës and Emily Dickinson, partnered with Slettahjell’s sung versions.

Massachusetts’ Dickinson and Yorkshire’s Brontës here share a fascination with often wintry seasons mirroring emotional states. Morten Qvenild’s initial piano figure spreads resonantly towards the close-miked vocals, introducing Remembrance’s rounded, cushioned sound. Reiersrud’s electric guitar solo is textural on Charlotte Brontë’s ‘Parting’, with its dewdrop piano, and leads a proggy middle-8 in ‘The Night-Wind’, where Slettahjell sounds pregnant with dawn’s dewy possibility. Qvenild’s music meanwhile makes Emily Brontë’s ‘She Dried Her Tears’ shimmering kin to 1970s singer-songwriters.

The gnomic, self-possessed Dickinson, who cleaved to the village of Amherst more even than the Brontës to Haworth, wrestled with death and dissected faith with doubt in her work, drawing on hymnal forms. Qvenild’s compositions and Slettahjell also draw on hymns throughout, sometimes rising to American gospel resolution matched by Qvenild’s rolling piano, and driven by Pål Hausken’s martial drums. Slettahjell adds American Songbook and pop power to Emily Brontë’s ‘The Night Is Darkening’, till skittering piano and rattling percussion tumble into cacophony, only for the singer to continue, even as the poet describes stubborn stasis. Dickinson honours a distant peer in ‘Charlotte Brontë’s Grave’, its imagined “Yorkshire hills” cleaved by lightning-strike organ and cavernous feedback, till beaten home by Hausken with almost violent sharpness. This album is deceptively attentive to its interior and elemental women.