JFDR - New Dreams (LP)

Some records feel like they were written in the hush between footsteps. New Dreams sits there, in the soft space where memory melts into synth glow and nylon-string drift. JFDR, the Icelandic songwriter also known as Jófríður Ákadóttir, had already made a case for quiet power with Pascal Pinon and the misty pulse of Samaris. This second solo album, released in 2020, turns the volume down further and trades spectacle for presence. It’s the kind of record that rewards stillness. Give it a midnight room and a dim lamp and it meets you halfway.

Her voice is the anchor. Breath-light but steady, it feels close enough to fog the glass, which makes every small production decision land with extra weight. A guitar line brushes by, a synth flickers, a drum pattern arrives and leaves like someone walking past an open door. The arrangements are spare, yet nothing feels thin. JFDR lets tones hang in the air until they glow. When a bass note finally drops, it hums like a power line. When a harmony finds her, it does so gently, and only as long as needed. So much restraint, yet the songs never drift off. They hold their shape through pulse, repetition, and a keen sense of when to step aside.

Lyrically, she writes with the economy of a short story. There are images of water, rooms, fragments of travel, the kind of half-remembered scenes that surface when you can’t sleep. There’s a tug between solitude and touch, a push-pull that will feel familiar if you spent any time lingering with headphones in 2020. But it’s not a diary dump. She pares lines back until they feel elemental, then lets melody do the carrying. The hooks are quiet and persistent, the kind that circle you hours later when you’re rinsing dishes or waiting for the train.

Production-wise, New Dreams keeps moving between organic and electronic without drawing a border. Acoustic guitar and voice are often the first faces you meet, then small synths and pattering beats open the room. Field-like textures give the songs a location, even if you can’t place it on a map. There’s air around every sound, which is why the album comes alive on a good system. The vinyl pressing, especially, flatters that space. On New Dreams vinyl the low end blooms with a soft physicality, and you catch tiny details in her phrasing that streaming compresses to a blur. If you collect JFDR vinyl, this one sits near the front because it turns a quiet record into a tactile little world.

It also fits in an interesting spot within her catalog. You can hear echoes of Samaris in the patient electronics, yet the beats feel less like club shadows and more like heartbeat. You can hear Pascal Pinon in the intimate guitar, yet the songwriting leans into dream logic, not folk form. JFDR’s own path since her teens has been unusually varied, and New Dreams feels like a point of focus where all those threads braid into something utterly hers. It’s easy to picture crate-diggers stumbling across it in a Melbourne record store, flipping the sleeve, taking a chance, and then going home to let it spin through three sides of a long night.

If you prefer to buy JFDR records online, there are solid options, and New Dreams tends to be the one people recommend when someone asks where to start. It helps that JFDR albums on vinyl tend to be thoughtfully presented, which matters for music this hushed. For listeners in the “vinyl records Australia” ecosystem, this is one of those imports worth the wait, the sort of album you’ll end up playing for friends who swear they only listen to loud music, and then you’ll watch their shoulders drop as the room gets quiet.

What keeps me returning is the way these songs honor small feelings without turning them into drama. She trusts understatement. A line can hang unresolved, a synth can arrive like fog and then burn off. By the end, you don’t feel like you’ve been told a grand story. You feel like you’ve remembered one. That’s a rarer magic than it sounds. New Dreams catches it, holds it in the light, then lets it go.