Raya

Reykjavík, Iceland · b. 1997 · FARA Records

Raya (Rán Halldórsdóttir, b. 23 July 1997) is from Reykjavík — a small, modern, hyper-connected Nordic capital where everybody knows everybody, which she found beautiful until roughly fifteen and unbearable immediately afterwards. Her formative fact is geological rather than emotional, and she gets faintly impatient explaining it: Iceland is a country made of fire under a country made of ice, sitting on a rift where the earth is actively pulling itself apart. The ground she grew up on is new — it arrives hot, it cools, and then people live on it. If you grow up somewhere still visibly being made, she says, believing anything is finished stops being an option.

She came up through the Reykjavík electronic scene: small rooms, cold walks home, a scene small enough that everybody plays on everybody's records. What she didn't come up through, and is tired of being asked about, is any kind of folk revival — she has no interest in playing an ancient Icelandic woman for an international audience, and uses horns and drums and a chant because they're enormous and they work. Her voice is clear, cold and carrying, mythic rather than pop, the kind that would work outdoors in weather with no microphone. The chant is a completely different instrument: low, rhythmic, communal and many-voiced. A crowd calling a name, never a war cry. The turn came when she stopped trying to be interesting and started trying to be loud, and found — to her considerable annoyance — that loud was where the honest material had been hiding.

She doesn't talk to a crowd, not out of coldness but because she doesn't think it's her job. She stands still and lets the record do the moving, and when the drop lands and thirty thousand people chant her name at her, she lets them, without smiling and without performing humility about it. It reads as either magnificent or arrogant depending entirely on who's watching, and she has never shown the slightest interest in resolving that. In person she is dry, direct and considerably funnier than any of it suggests. Blunt, unhurried, immovable.