[Cover photo credit to Anna Maggy]

Icelandic singer Ólöf Arnalds has announced her new album, Spíra, due out the 5th of December, 2025, via Bella Union and available to preorder here. To accompany the announcement, Ólöf has shared first single “Tár í morgunsárið” (“Tears at Dawn”), a track in which she “ponders the gaping hole in her stomach when she renounced Catholicism as a teenager.” This void is stark “in a world of commodities stripped of meaning and true spirituality.” 

Across five albums in nearly twenty years, Ólöf has explored “emotional territories often concerned with love–equal parts familial, platonic and romantic.”

Ólöf’s consecutive albums featured guests such as Ragnar Kjartansson and Björk, but by 2015 she found herself drifting towards other projects: founding the grassroots cultural space Mengi in Reykjavík, working as a copywriter, raising her son and step-daughter, and collaborating with her long-time friend (and now husband) Skúli Sverrisson, for example on a piece written especially for Ólöf and the Icelandic Symphony Orchestra.

With her new album, Spíra, which means “Sprout”, Ólöf has “found her joy in writing songs rekindled.” Like her earliest albums, it is exclusively in Icelandic, the arrangements are markedly stripped back compared to her last two records, and it is mostly recorded in single takes in the control room of Sundlaugin.

Spíra is produced by Skúli Sverrisson, who also contributes bass and guitar. His resumé includes musical direction for Laurie Anderson, recordings with Blonde Redhead, and work with artists such as David Sylvian, Jon Hassell, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Bill Frisell and Arto Lindsay. Davíð Þór Jónsson contributes piano and guitar to the record, much as he did during Ólöf’s busiest touring schedule nearly fifteen years ago.