Danish singer-songwriter Agnes Obel is set to release the anticipated follow-up to her 2014 breakthrough LP Aventine on 21st October via Play It Again Sam. Citizen of Glass has been recorded and produced in Berlin, with an album teaser trailer having just been released. Obel has also shared the first single from the album, ‘Familiar.’ As its title hints, Obel’s ethereal voice and folk-tinged style are still intact, but the track is also swathed in strings, handclaps, percussion and an overall fuller atmosphere. Watch the video below.
Obel talked about some of the concepts behind the new album: “The title comes from the German concept of the gläserner bürger, the human or glass citizen. It’s actually a legal term about the level of privacy the individual has in a state, and in health it’s become a term about how much we know about a person’s body or biology or history – if they’re completely made of glass we know everything. There’s an increasing sense in this world that you have to make yourself a bit of glass. To be willing to open up, use yourself as material, and not just if you’re an artist or a musician.”
She continued: “I worked with the title from the very beginning to push myself to do new things. I wanted to push myself conceptually from the starting point, to push the glass theme throughout the songs in different ways – in the lyrics, in the instruments – to do things in a very new way. As an album, it feels bigger to me, a lot bigger.”
Photo credit: Alex Bruel Flagstad
