BELLA1677 // 5 December 2025

Anyone who has paid attention to Icelandic music this century knows how Ólöf Arnalds can mesmerise a room with nothing but a small guitar and her distinctive soprano voice. Across five albums in nearly twenty years, her gently plucked guitar, charango, violin and koto have provided the bedrock for vivid narrations straddling the mundane and mythological, sketching out rich emotional territories often concerned with love–equal parts familial, platonic and romantic. The music evokes Joanna Newsom, Nico’s early solo albums and Vashti Bunyan but the deceptively simple arrangements and tightly braided melodies are, ultimately and unmistakably, very much her own.

With her new album, Spíra (Sprout), Ólöf has found her joy in writing songs rekindled. In many ways it harkens back to her debut: 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, much like Við og við.