Following on from Árstíðir‘s astounding appearance at Nordic Delight Festival, where the Icelandic acapella stars wowed the crowds in Nicolaïkerk, the band last week opened digital pre-sales of the forthcoming record Hvel.
The album is now expected to appear around mid-November and digital pre-sales of the album were opened on 6 October at arstidir.bandcamp.com, coinciding with ‘Things You Said’ being announced as the first single.
This is Árstíðir’s third album and has been realised thanks to the incredible success of the band’s Kickstarter fundraiser, which more than tripled its original target in a matter of months.
Glacial adventure
In order to fulfil one of the stretch goals of the campaign, the band teamed up with visual artist Kitty Von-Sometime to produce a collaborative art project, where the resulting video was available for exclusive-streaming to backers in advance of the album’s release. The resulting video from this collaborative union, entitled ‘OPUS/You Again’, was also officially shared with the world last week via an exclusive article about the visual artist.
Filmed on the Langjökull glacier in July with cinematographer Hákon Sverrisson, two members of Árstíðir – Gunnar Már Jakobsson and Daníel Auðunsson – made the snowmobile journey into the icy wilderness. In the early stagses, the band gave Kitty a choice of four demos to include in the project, and she picked the track ‘You Again’. Commenting on what happened next, Gunnar explains, ‘How we finished composing the song, that was in a way a collaboration – combining the lyrics and the sound through the imagery that she has been making.’ Both Gunnar and Daníel can be seen in the behind the scenes ‘making of’ video, talking about the choice of song and also their time on set and the experience of being on a glacier.
To the beautiful sounds of Árstíðir, the video captures the incredible glacial landscapes and stars Kitty in an astounding costume (courtesy of award-winning Iceland-based Irish fashion designer Fiona Cribben) together with a 160-kg ice sculpture (by Ottó Magnússon) that has a lamb’s heart at its centre.
Endnote: if anyone reading this hasn’t yet seen the band’s performance of the ancient hymn ‘Heyr himna smiður‘ at a German train station (that went viral last year), then now would be a good time to rectify that by clicking here.
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