Iceland’s Ólafur Arnalds Releases Eerily Serene New Single

A metaphor for “being embraced by something larger than yourself while exploring new territories,” “Woven Song,” the new single from Icelandic multi-instrumentalist and composer Ólafur Arnalds‘ forthcoming album, Some Kind of Peace, captures “the feeling of being held while you open your heart.”

For the accompanying music video, director Thomas Vanz used an acrylic pouring process called “viscous fingering” to obtain fractal shapes.

“‘Woven Song’ is a defining moment of ‘some kind of peace,’” says Arnalds in a press release about the song.  “Some kind of peace was born out of the following mantra: ‘we can’t control anything that happens to us. All we can do is control how we react to what life gives us.'” 

The album is about what it means to be alive, and Arnalds weaves real-world pieces of his life story throughout the album, using sampling techniques to “give the listener a window into his experiences.” All the collaborators on the album were key to Arnalds’s life during its making, including British musician Bonobo, featured on the album’s opener, Icelandic singer and multi-instrumentalist JFDR whom Ólafur has admired for years, and his friend Josin, a German singer-songwriter.

Recorded at his studio at the harbour in downtown Reykjavik, the album is Arnalds’s most personal record to date. 

The album arrives on Nov. 6 via Mercury KX. Following previously released singles “We Contain Multitudes” and “Back To The Sky” (feat. JFDR), “Woven Song” is a unique song in Arnalds’s already varied catalogue of music. As the song progresses, melancholic strings filter in and out, the track becomes eerily serene.