Inspired by motherhood and its transformations, the Danish artist continues to nurture a mystique steeped in mysticism.
Agnes Obel has never been fond of austerity, yet one might have imagined the opposite by looking at her previous covers, where she wore a grave expression, blond hair pulled back, and a long swan-like neck restrained by high collars.
In a press release, the Scandinavian diva informs us that she welcomed a baby girl since the preceding chapter published just before the pandemic (Myopia, in 2020) and that this pregnancy transformed her, revealing to her “an odd sense of interconnectedness with all that is living”.
Lively rhythms and hypnotic brass
On the fifth album she has shaped in recent times, her songwriting does not stray radically from what she has done before: choruses of gentle melancholy, fragile yet powerful, spectral yet welcoming, sustained by a classy piano, a slender harp, cinematic strings and a voice that sometimes reaches the mystical.
The elusive singer and composer has the knack of perverting this gracefully elegant timbre by sometimes bending it toward a grave abyssal register or, on the contrary, lifting it toward youthful, high pitches. She occasionally sows mischief in her small, self-contained world by introducing lively rhythms, just brushed by the fingertips, and hypnotic brass. Not everyone is blessed with the ability to conjure volupté through purity, to reach the Milky Way through minimalism.
The Meaning of Flowers (Deutsche Grammophon/Decca Records/Universal). Released September 18.
