I had a fairly classical background soundtrack to my life, as my parents were studying classical music when I was growing up and my twin sister and I both went to music school for seemingly an eternity. My sister hammering sonatas on the piano through the walls still haunts my memory.
I started writing songs on the guitar when I was 11 and my parents gave me an electric guitar for Christmas. I had asked for it and wanted to start a band with my sister and our cousin, which didn’t exactly happen but I scribbled many a song in my bedroom until one day the band became a reality.
When we became teenagers, our father would sometimes take us to performances he did around Reykjavik, both in the avant-garde scene and at clubs and venues, which had a huge impact on me as a young teen and brought the music world and scene very close to me.

I wouldn’t have had the guts to do anything solo if it wasn’t for the bands I was in. That’s where I learned by doing; how to work, play, perform, travel, communicate and, as well as how to fail and succeed and make mistakes and fuck up and everything in between.
To me, working as a solo artist means having more control over things but also more responsibility, and sometimes I miss the old band days when it was a joint effort and the weight of the world didn’t sit on my shoulders.

Dream On is completely intertwined with New Dreams. It’s the homage that nobody asked for. When Covid happened I had a lot of time to reflect and I felt bad that I tour and present and celebrate that album. I put a lot of effort into New dreams, and the whole endeavour suddenly felt like a sort of anti-climax. So my idea was to do that – obviously not tour – but to present and celebrate.
When I was a teenager I would often go to the library and listen to Björk albums, b-sides and remixes, live albums, anything I could get my hands on. I grew to love alternative versions of songs and feeling closer to the artist and closer to the process. That’s a big part of what I’m trying to offer with this EP.

All the reworks, apart from Taking a part of me, are recent meditations on the songs. Taking a part of me is the original demo which was a lullaby in a different time signature. I left it pretty much untouched from when it was written almost 3 years ago.
The others are closer to live versions, they are stripped back and raw. The Drifter remake was made in March for the release concert in Iceland that never happened. We made that version in the days before I left for Australia and so that always stayed with me as a hidden gem.

They were all written ages ago and were lying around in the massive work folder from the New Dreams workdays. They were songs I had struggled to complete and coming back to them felt like closing a chapter of my life that I had left open-ended.
One of the most amazing things I noticed, on a personal level, was how different I had become since I was the last working on those songs. I felt more confident in my production decisions and I was able to enjoy the process, where I had last been struggling. Finishing the songs was a beautiful and cathartic ritual.

Drifter was actually filmed in the house where my husband Josh grew up and where I’ve been living since March 2020.
Emily Avila, the director, had the idea of working with the house as if it were a character in the story. At the same time, I had been researching both old Icelandic witchcraft and tarot symbolism, which came to me in a dream just days before shooting. We tied those elements together, along with my grandmother’s wedding dress that she sent me when I told her I was getting married and a few other details from life in the past few months.
The house is an old Queenslander house which is culturally very significant for the area that we are in. To have presented something personal for me and this chapter of my life is very meaningful and beautiful to me.

I have always been a minimalist and in my practice, I try to work with few elements but strong ones rather than a lot of little ones. I also like the anti-space and the nothingness to contrast the important moments.
I have been doing a lot of scoring lately and writing instrumental music and I’ve been very attracted to that process, allowing the music to flow and allow it to have long instrumental sections so I also played with that, in particular in Drifter and Givers Takers.

Good Time was written in a state of absolute urgency. I remember so vividly the desperate need to write that song and it just vomited itself out of me, if that makes any sense at all. It’s in these moments, where you are guided by the song, completely immersed in the feeling and the urgency, that magic happens.

I was doing a lot of drawings with my eyes closed and I sent a few of those to artist and designer David Stith. He drew upon that idea and the result is the cover, raw and flowing, intuitively with eyes closed.

I’ve just gotten back to Iceland from Australia where I’m currently enjoying the cold breeze, nostalgic feelings, grey clouds covering the skies and naked trees shivering in the wind outside my window.
I am deeply excited to start working on the next album, trying to capture everything that I’ve experienced, dreamt, thought of and forgotten in this long interim.