Amidst carefully plucked acoustic guitars and a gentle bass line, Jófríður Ákadóttir AKA JFDR ruminates over the melancholic process of ageing and growing up in her latest single “My Work”. With lyrics that centre around her mother and her feelings towards JFDR’s sadness, “My Work” is a tender and moving song that has a vulnerability to it. The artist said that the track came from “thinking about my mother, how a mother can only be as happy as her saddest child, and I felt sorry, I felt how that was sadder than me being sad.”

In terms of ambience, “My Work” is reminiscent of Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide” if it were written by a Scandinavian in Brooklyn; it has an inherently chilly air to it but matches its combination of introspection and melancholia.

The video accompaniment, directed by Anna Maggý, sees a naked Jófríður Ákadóttir largely through translucent surfaces; her naked form, which is suggested, is hinted at through what appears to be a sheet of fractured ice, casting her face in a broken way. The sheet acts as a barrier between us and her, a physical manifestation of the extended metaphor that the song discusses. It’s a blockade between a sense of youth and innocence that was once possessed by JFDR, but is no longer.

Water is a large feature of the video. It conjures a general feeling of coldness and isolation. The sea stretching out beyond the line of vision, the presence of Jófríður Ákadóttir floating atop the waves or submerged in the dark depths only emphasises JFDR’s aim to create a song that captured her feelings about a specific “transitional moment” of her life.

Of “My Work”, she said “I remember a very beautiful loneliness; I was excited to be there (Brooklyn), but it was all foreign to me. And I was looking out the window and thinking about death, the cigarette triggered this I guess, but I had also been thinking about naivety and innocence and glorifying something I was (or thought I was) before I experienced sadness and loneliness in the adult way.”

Watch and pre-order the album via Bandcamp below.

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