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JFDR announces second album, New Dreams

By Andy Malt | Published on Thursday 21 November 2019

JFDR – aka Icelandic musician Jófríður Ákadóttir – has announced that she will release her second album, ‘New Dreams’, next spring. Out now is new single ‘My Work’.

“‘My Work’ marks a somewhat transitional moment, where I was pushing myself to my limits, travelling constantly, running away from my home, from my demons”, she explains. “I had been working on these chords for a little bit, I was smoking a cigarette in my friend Aaron’s loft in Brooklyn. I had spent a few weeks there and it was getting colder”.

“I remember a very beautiful loneliness”, she adds. “I was excited to be there, but it was all foreign to me. And I was looking out the window and thinking about death, the cigarette triggered this I guess, but I had also been thinking about naivety and innocence and glorifying something I was – or thought I was – before I experienced sadness and loneliness in the adult way”.

She goes on: “I was thinking about my mother, how a mother can only be as happy as her saddest child, and I felt sorry, I felt how that was sadder than me being sad. The song reminds me of those moments I was living at the loft, in all weathers, on the stairway looking at the city in the distance, on the roof , in Aaron’s room, in my room, in the evening or night time, smoking, existing, wondering what I was doing there, processing this magical yet heart wrenching lack of belonging, was it what I wanted?”

As for how this album differs from her solo debut, ‘Brazil’, she says: “This record is more thought out. The person who’s singing is more honest, not as ‘coated’ or ‘poetic’ as on ‘Brazil’. It’s less eloquent, perhaps, but more what’s happening for me right now. The meaning isn’t always revealed to me until afterwards”.

You can catch JFDR live in the UK at St Pancras Old Church in London on 30 Jan. Watch the video for ‘My Work’ here: