Emotive, dark yet delicate, Fríd – aka Sigfríð Rut Gyrðisdóttir – creates music straight from the soul, pinpointed by her powerful, wave-like vocals & backed-up by a moving wall of melancholic sound and space. Having released her debut EP in 2019 she’s back after a bit of a break with a deeper, textured sound on her new A/B single “Woods / There Are Scarier Things Than The Sea”.
As a young Icelandic, self-styled producer, Fríd has been singing her whole life but in 2015 after a series of rejections she had given up on her dream of a career in music. However, a friend persuaded Fríd to take an opportunity of attending a music school in Denmark and it was there she began to write seriously, with “Touch” being the first track from that period. In the next couple of years she developed an interest in both the music of fka Twigs, James Blake and AURORA, and the technical side of the industry by getting involved in audio engineering.
Out of these years of writing and learning came Fríd’s debut EP If you listen… in 2019, inspired by the aforementioned artists, the world around her and the ability to experiment in the studio. In the same year she debuted at Iceland Airwaves and the Hun Solo showcase at Spot Festival in Aarhus, Denmark.
With “Woods / There Are Scarier Things Than The Sea” Fríd’s music is now making an exciting turn for the dark and experimental, harnessing the power and vulnerabilities in nature and reflecting this in her songs. Both tracks lean into glitchy electronics and layering of sounds, with Fríd creating on a Roland Juno-DS. Her vocals are treated and filtered to the point of otherworldliness…but there’s a human heart beating right at the centre of it.
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“Woods” is the darker of the tracks, with Fríd explaining that the track “is really all about ageing and death. I’ve always been afraid of death but also you can’t help be a little fascinated because it’s so unknown.”
“I love being in nature and the surroundings and bringing some of this energy into my songs. The adventure of it all. There are some sound recordings included from a trip I took around the West Fjords – I think it gives the song even more atmosphere and character.”
