Reykjavík Grapevine - mar 2020, Qupperneq 16

Jófrí!ur Ákadóttir sits in her
house, in the midst of a storm that
has shut down Reykjavík com-
pletely. “I woke up at seven and it
was so loud,” she exclaims, as she
hunts for an elusive coffee mug.
“The house was singing! It was
pretty wild.”
Jófrí!ur, who performs under
the stage name JFDR, looks even
younger than her 25-years as she
curls up in a chair. But despite her
youth, the musician has a well-
earned reputation as one of the
hardest workers on the scene. Jó-
frí!ur’s music career started when
she was only 14 as part of Pascal
Pinon, a band she formed with her
twin sister Ásthildur. Since then,
she has gone on to form, and per-
form with, many different acts,
notably electronic groups Samaris
and Gangly, as well as produce her
own solo work as JFDR.
New dreams & new
sounds
Jófrí!ur’s latest solo album, ‘New
Dreams’ will be released in March,
three years after her last record,
‘Brazil’ came out. She’s already put
out three songs from the upcom-
ing effort—“Shimmer”, “My Work,”
and “Taking A Part Of Me”—which
each reveal a new side of the art-
ist’s sound. While her voice has
always had a girlish, naive quality
to it, these new works showcase a
delicate tension between vulner-
ability and confidence. They are
subtle in their presentation but
powerful in their lyricism. As Jó-
frí!ur explains, this album took
a long time to make, but she was
determined to get it right.
“It’s been a year on hold,” she
says, staring into space. “I finished
the recording around mid-2018
and then I took a year and a half to
get everything together. I left New
York and settled in Iceland again
and I had to sort of reconnect with
home—the feeling of home and
normal life and what everything
meant to me.”
Settling down
Her new songs mirror these
themes. “I yearn for the innocence
I once think I had, a lack of sense
for a fear that grows as I grow old-
er,” she sings with heartbreaking
honesty in “My Work.” But as she
talks today, Jófrí!ur seems a lot
more settled into the person she
has become, and has put some of
her worries to bed.
“I think one of the things that
scared me was putting a bit of
pressure on that album and my-
self,” she explains. “I wrote the al-
bum when I was in a state where
I felt that everything was impor-
tant, that there had to be weight
and meaning in everything. And
then I came out of that and I was
like, no it’s not, not everything is
a big deal, you don’t have to worry
about it.”
A different person
Jófrí!ur definitely does not come
across as worried. Her conversa-
tion, although touching on heavy
topics, is light and spacious. Qui-
etly thoughtful and with an easy
charm, she seems a world away
from the previous, more anxious
version of herself—and in fact,
this dissonance between the per-
son who she was when she record-
ed the music and the person she is
now irks Jófrí!ur somewhat.
“It’s interesting listening to
music that you made years ago
because that’s not who I am right
Culture
Dream On
JFDR’s latest release ‘New Dreams’ is a
portrait of !rowin! up
Words: Josie Gaitens Photo: Art Bicnick
16The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 03— 2020
Jófrí"ur (le#) pictured with flowers

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