ANDVARP

Reykjavík-born · Oslo-based since 24 · b. 1997 · FARA Records

ANDVARP (Hafrún Eiríksdóttir, b. 29 January 1997, Reykjavík, based in Oslo since twenty-four) belongs to a specific Icelandic generation that got the whole sequence: she was eleven when the banks went down in 2008 and the country's currency halved overnight, thirteen when the volcano shut European airspace, and in her twenties while tourism rebuilt the economy and remade the city into something her parents didn't recognise. That's not background colour — it's the reason she's in Oslo. A great many Icelanders in their late twenties left for Norway in that decade for the ordinary reasons: wages, rent, room. She's one of them. She found her way in through piano and choir in the ordinary Icelandic way, then a long detour: she trained as a physiotherapist, worked for four years, and didn't release anything until she was twenty-seven. The training shows up in the writing more than anyone expects — she thinks about breath, rhythm and the body as mechanical facts rather than as metaphors.

Close, unforced and almost conversational, sitting much nearer the microphone than the genre usually allows. She doesn't soar and doesn't belt — the euphoria in her records comes entirely from what happens underneath her while she stays exactly the same, a considerably harder trick than rising with the production. She moves between Icelandic and English mid-phrase without marking the change, and the English lines are always the plainer of the two, which is deliberate: the language she thinks in gets the images and the language she works in gets the statements. Her influences run the Icelandic art-pop tradition of singing in Icelandic without explanation or apology; melodic trance from the long-build, slow-release end rather than the festival end; and, less obviously, four years of clinical work — she's more interested in breath and pulse as physical systems than as poetry.

Direct and completely unmystical, which is the opposite of what people expect and something she enjoys. She's at least five years older than the audience assumes and had an entire other career first, and she brings both facts up early because they short-circuit the ethereal-Nordic-woman framing before anybody can apply it. She was a physiotherapist for four years and didn't release anything until twenty-seven — “the earth is breathing” is a line written by somebody who's had her hands on a lot of ribs. She's lived a fifth of her life outside Iceland, which means singing in Icelandic is now a decision rather than a default, and she has no plans to stop. Level, blunt, warm.