Agnes Obel Shares “Island of Doom,” New Single/Video off Forthcoming Album Myopia
Photos by Alex Brüel Flagstad
The Danish singer-songwriter and pianist Agnes Obel has always been a self-sufficient experimentalist, writing, recording, performing and producing her records entirely on her own. Her forthcoming album announced today (Oct. 29) and out Feb. 21, 2020, Myopia, in part takes her own insular process as its theme: “The albums I’ve worked on have all required that I build a bubble of some kind in which everything becomes about the album,” explains Obel. “Paradoxically, for me I need to create my own myopia to make music.” Obel has also released the LP’s lead single, “Island of Doom.”
“Island of Doom” is accompanied by a dreamlike video that calls ultrasound images and grainy closed-circuit TV to mind, created by Obel and collaborator Alex Brüel Flagstad. The track is both stately and unsettling, as its title suggests. “Island of Doom” features Obel’s haunting, luminous piano and mesmerizing vocals alongside plucked strings—all of which, as she notes in a statement, are “pitched down and up.” She goes on to say that the song explores the difficulty of coming to terms with a loved one’s death, one of the many forms of myopia addressed on the album:
In my experience when someone close to you dies it is simply impossible to comprehend that you can’t ever talk to them or reach them somehow ever again. They are in many ways still alive because in your consciousness nothing has changed, they’re still there with everyone else you know.
Of the record as a whole, she explains:
For me Myopia is an album about trust and doubt. Can you trust yourself or not? Can you trust your own judgments? Can you trust that you will do the right thing? Can you trust your instincts and what you are feeling? Or are your feelings skewed?
Watch “Island of Doom” and Obel’s 2016 Paste Studio session below, then find her tour dates and Myopia’s album art and tracklist further down.
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