Open Your Eyes by Thomas & The Angry Hearts: Norwegian Rock in English, Forty Years On
TNT Guitarist Ronni Le Tekrø Co-Produces a Lillestrøm Folk-Rock Song About the Hour Before Sunrise
Thomas Warhuus Ådland does not write to order. A song starts for him with a feeling, a guitar and a run of chords. Open Your Eyes, the new single from his Lillestrøm folk-rock band Thomas & The Angry Hearts, applies that habit to the quiet hour before sunrise. Released on 16 October, it was produced by Ronni Le Tekrø, the guitarist of TNT, with engineer Kjartan Hesthagen.
Thomas And The Angry Hearts are in the playlist below with Open Your Eyes, next to the indie rock this desk keeps on rotation, and the band’s artist profile holds the rest of their coverage. The single came to this desk through PopHits.Co Music Charts, which verifies independent artists and places their releases across its network of music news titles. Play it first, then read on for how the song was made.
Open Your Eyes Sets Thomas Ådland’s Feeling-First Songwriting on the Quiet Hour Before Sunrise
The subject is small and familiar. It is late, the house is quiet, and for once everything feels right. Then the light comes up, and yesterday’s problems come back with it. Open Your Eyes stays inside that stretch of time and the reluctance to leave it. So the title has a double edge: it reads like a kind instruction and a sad one at once.
Ådland’s method also suits a song like this. He has described picking up the guitar, playing around with chords and singing whatever words arrive until a melody holds. He is also open about writing as release, a place where a lot of emotion can come out. The words in his songs tend to stay close and fragile. When he reaches for something bigger, oceans or kings and queens, it stands in for a relationship that is hard to name. He wrote the song with Truls Fjeldvang, who shares the composer credit. The band was already playing it live in Lillestrøm last December.
Thomas & The Angry Hearts Sing Open Your Eyes in English, the Road TNT Took in 1984
The band is Norwegian, and Ådland sings in English. He has said Norwegian simply sounds wrong to him in this kind of music, and that English suits his voice. However, that choice has a cost in a scene where artists who sign deals singing English are often nudged towards Norwegian. He has said that defending it in the Norwegian mainstream press would probably get him called a traitor.
His producer took the same road four decades earlier. TNT formed in Trondheim in 1982, and their self-titled debut that year is the only TNT album with Norwegian lyrics. From Knights of the New Thunder in 1984 they sang in English. Then the video for Seven Seas went into heavy rotation on MTV. Scotland’s Runrig made the opposite choice and made it pay. Their 1995 single An Ubhal as Àirde was the first song in Scottish Gaelic to reach the UK Singles Chart. Thomas & The Angry Hearts sit between those two stories. They are a Norwegian folk-rock band writing in English for listeners in the UK and Ireland.
Ronni Le Tekrø’s Pre-Production and Kjartan Hesthagen’s Engineering Shape the Structure of Open Your Eyes
Le Tekrø co-founded TNT in 1982. In 1989, Guitar World named him among the ten best guitarists in the world. He lives in Nyhagen in Vestre Toten and runs his own studio there. Thomas & The Angry Hearts made their 2025 self-titled album at Studio Nyhagen with him and Hesthagen. The new single carries the same two production credits.
Ådland calls Le Tekrø a mentor on sound, concept and delivery. He also credits the pre-production with him as the stage that mattered most. Similarly, he gives Hesthagen’s musical judgement a share of the result. The band’s own rule for arranging is plain: the song decides when it has enough and when there is room for more.
In the band, Ådland shares lead vocals with Hilde B. Ådland. Nils Stian Aasheim plays most string instruments that do not need a bow, and the members hold songwriting workshops together each year.
Who It Is For
The single is for folk-rock listeners who like a song to admit what it is about in the first minute. It is also for anyone who has stayed up too late because the night felt better than the morning would. It belongs to the band’s Irish folk-rock and Americana line, made in Norway with a hard rock producer.
BestRock.News’s curator team:
“A song about not wanting the night to end could easily overstay its welcome. Open Your Eyes finishes in three minutes and twenty-two seconds, about the length of a feeling that is already slipping away. That economy is the producers’ best decision.”
Where to Hear Open Your Eyes and Follow Thomas & The Angry Hearts Across Every Platform
Play Open Your Eyes on Apple Music, Deezer, Tidal, Amazon Music and Pandora, or choose a service through the smartlink. The band’s previous single is on Spotify too.
Follow Thomas & The Angry Hearts on Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer, Instagram, Threads and Facebook.
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