Track By Track: The Water, The Lover By Néfur

Néfur collaborates with Icelandic glaciers on her latest release The Water, The Lover

Have you ever wondered how co-writing an album with a glacier might be? Would they be more of a Lennon or McCartney type? Would they provide the music to lyrics written by you, or vice versa? Wonder no more. Catalan-born and Iceland-based artist Néfur did precisely that. Inspired by her interactions with Icelandic glaciers in 2020, Néfur worked with their sounds to create music emanating from the icy giants, resulting in her latest album The Water, The Lover, out June 6.

The Water, The Lover by Néfur

The Egg

The pleasure of the universe as the origin of creation. Inspired by my ecstatic experience hiking and singing with Ok, the lost glacier. The Egg gives you that tingly feeling of dipping in and out of hot and cold pools. Sometimes rich bass and lush melodies embrace you, then you are taken to the upper reaches of crackly, airy sounds that tickle your ears.

The Mermaid

I spontaneously sang and recorded the original melody with the ocean waves of Djúpalónssandur, by Snæfellsjökull. It expresses the longing for depths and mysteries from a wild heart. Like the mermaids of folklore, this song lures you in with its sensual beginning, but before you know it you are caught in an electric thunderstorm of percussive beats, before crashing against the rocks.

I can vividly remember our glacier guide shouting, “We need to leave now!”

The String

The line, “Her sex pounds in cosmic pulse,” may be best to describe the feeling of the song. It is like a primal dance. The percussion actually comes from a sudden deep cracking sound of the ice as we were recording inside a cave in Fjallsjökull. I can vividly remember our glacier guide shouting, “We need to leave now!” It’s all on tape. The experience inspired the idea of glacier caves as a kind of womb, how bodies and landscapes mirror one another and hold space for wildness.

The Human

An invitation to remember that we are living in a deep, sensual, animated planet. An invitation into deep feeling and the erotic as a form of kinship with nature. An invitation to acknowledge our role in the future of the planet and our response-ability as ancestors. The song starts with simple footsteps on snow, recorded when I was walking on Ok, and then builds towards an anthemic chorus. Maybe it is like a march, a single person walking that is gradually joined by others until together they become a movement.

The Mirror

The Mirror is the most playful of the songs. The melodies, sounds and beats flirt with you. There are lots of bubbles, pops and sparkles. It’s fun! Most of the songs in the album have some undercurrent of darkness, but The Mirror is pure light, and it comes together in a chorus that is maybe the most uplifting in the whole album.

The Phoenix

When they burned her to death, Joan of Arc’s heart would not burn. This song speaks about the empowerment that comes from the radical courage of choosing your truth despite external judgment. I’ve never written a song like it. I adopted a more operatic singing style because it felt like the song needed that sense of grandeur and solemnity. Like a Greek tragedy. Then the choir enters with this ominous, portentous sound, and it’s just so powerful.

The Source

It literally brings us back to the source, the sounds of the glaciers. The variety and vibrancy of the sounds remind you how living they are. Pure glacier. Pure water. A field recording track of pure surrender.