Jófríður Ákadóttir was at odds with herself. “I can't tell my feelings apart,” she sings in “Life Man,” a standout from Museum, her third album as JFDR. “Even when I reason with myself/I’m no closer.” All the while, she keeps moving: “Get up brush your hair and start the day at midday/In the meantime.” Fittingly, the song’s title comes from an unsatisfying interaction with a therapist, in which Ákadóttir unspooled some existential crisis and was greeted with raised eyebrows and a simple shrug of “Life, man.”
Jocular as the reference might be, Ákadóttir’s therapist’s words help contextualize Museum. Right when lockdown was starting in March of 2020, Ákadóttir released New Dreams, an album that marked a fuller realization of her sound and boasted some of her most striking songwriting. Having holed up in Australia with her bandmate and soon-to-be-husband Joshua Wilkinson, Ákadóttir went through the sort of listless identity spiral many artists experienced during the pandemic. After performing in various projects since her teenage years and having already released over 10 full-lengths, she questioned her future in music until Wilkinson encouraged her to revisit some demos. Soon, Ákadóttir started collecting new fragments and lost scraps and eventually booked a recording session in New York with longtime collaborator Shahzad Ismaily.
Museum continues the refinements of New Dreams. As always, many of her songs are strikingly pretty. Across the album, Ákadóttir and her collaborators craft patient art-pop atmospheres above rippling piano and acoustic guitar; many songs are accentuated by the metallic tones of the langspil, an Icelandic string instrument. On singles “The Orchid” and “Spectator,” Ákadóttir drifts on aqueous synths and flickering orchestration to powerful denouements. Discussing the title Museum, Ákadóttir likened these songs to sculptures, pieces chiseled out of recent memory. With her incantatory melodic sensibility, they could just as well be conjurings, wading through the debris of life before arriving at gentle catharses.
Images of nature abound on Museum. In “Air Unfolding” the air in question is a tangible gulf between two people anxious about where they stand, while relationships bloom in “Underneath the Sun” and contort in “Sideways Moon.” She renders human flaws and foibles as something elemental. Under JFDR, Ákadóttir hasn’t shied away from the tradition of Icelandic art that captures the surreal, severe nature of her country’s landscape, and there is often something hushed and naturalistic to her music. Her voice is an expressive whisper carried not on storm gusts or carved from towering glaciers, but instead weaving in and out of more wandering winds and waters.
JFDR’s music is not necessarily minimal, but it is restrained—sometimes to a fault. It’s easy to fall for the slowly unfolding beauty in her songs, and every now and then she comes around with something more propulsive, like “Life Man” or New Dreams’ “Taking a Part of Me,” that more directly depicts the forward motion she seeks in her lyrics. That is not where JFDR is yet; Museum is by design a document of stasis. She makes intimate portraits cataloging seismic emotional transformations, but occurring in single, resounding moments of stillness. Museum feels like a transitional statement—a small but powerful reflection on an era when everyone and everything ground to a halt. But at their best, these songs also offer hints of how Ákadóttir might start moving again.
