Nomadic Narwhal
“It just had to get out of me and turn the page to the future.” — Jesse Beisner on going inward, writing through life, and what comes next for Cinematic Metal’s most personal project.
Nomadic Narwhal built its identity on oceanic mythology and cinematic scope — the kind of world-building that asks listeners to surrender to something vast and immersive. Call of the Current, out now via Seaborne Records, does something different. It’s smaller in the best possible sense: closer, more exposed, and more directly human than anything founder Jesse Beisner has put out under this name before.
We spoke with Beisner about what pushed him toward that emotional honesty, what orchestral music taught him about heaviness that guitar tones never could, and why the current detour from Nomadic Narwhal’s larger narrative is very much a feature, not a bug.
It was the first writing session. At that point it was obvious that it just had to get out of me and turn the page to the future.
— Jesse Beisner / Nomadic NarwhalWriting to feel normal again — that’s a specific kind of creativity, the kind that doesn’t have an audience in mind when it starts. It makes sense that the result sounds different. It was made for different reasons.
The audience awareness here is notable. This wasn’t a purely self-indulgent turn — Beisner thought about what his listeners use the music for and decided to honor that by being honest with them, not by giving them exactly what they expected.
First session. No deliberation. That instinct — to trust the song’s emotional urgency over its technical refinement — is exactly what gives Call of the Current the texture it has. Polish can wait. Some things can’t.
No matter how much I learn, it will only be a fraction of what giants like Dvořák and Korsakov have probably forgotten.
— Jesse Beisner / Nomadic NarwhalThat’s not false modesty — it’s the orientation of someone who takes influence seriously. Naming Dvořák and Korsakov as the standard you’re measuring yourself against is a statement about what Cinematic Metal actually means to Beisner. It’s not a genre tag. It’s an aspiration.
Creative control here isn’t about ego — it’s about coherence. A project with this much sonic range needs a single point of gravity. Beisner is that point. Without it, Nomadic Narwhal risks becoming unrecognizable to itself.
Fresh ears in the morning. It’s a deceptively simple process that separates a good instinct from a confirmed decision. The sections that survive the overnight test earn their place. The ones that don’t — however good they sound at midnight — are probably serving a different song.
There’s no vocalist telling me their story or telling me how to feel. The emotion is just there, raw, expertly written, and performed. What the hell just happened and how’d they do that?
— Jesse Beisner / Nomadic NarwhalThat revelation — that orchestral music could be brutal without a single distorted guitar — is the conceptual heart of what Nomadic Narwhal is trying to do. It’s heavy music that learned its lessons from an entirely different tradition. That’s why it sounds like nothing else in the genre.
A soundtrack for the days you can’t be in the water. That’s the clearest statement of purpose Nomadic Narwhal has ever offered — and it explains exactly why the project built a following of ocean and music people simultaneously. It’s filling a gap that nobody else had thought to fill.
Three words. The surprise is understandable — this is a departure. The relief is the more interesting reaction. It suggests the audience was ready for Beisner to let them in, and that the wait had been felt on both sides.
The narrative will resume. Whatever Nomadic Narwhal surfaces with next, Call of the Current has already done its job — it kept the project alive during a hard stretch and gave the audience something real in return. Stream it now via Spotify and follow the project for what comes next. Are you an independent artist with a story to tell? Get featured on Exposed Vocals.
