Ask anyone: Ólöf Arnalds can mesmerise a room with nothing but a small guitar and her distinctive soprano voice. Across five albums in nearly twenty years, her gently plucked guitar, charango, violin and koto have provided the bedrock for vivid narrations straddling the mundane and mythological, sketching out rich emotional territories often concerned with love–equal parts familial, platonic and romantic. The music evokes Joanna Newsom, Nico’s early solo albums and Vashti Bunyan but the deceptively simple arrangements and tightly braided melodies are, ultimately and unmistakably, very much her own.

Although a classically trained singer and violinist, Ólöf has been an active practitioner of popular music for thirty years. When she joined múm in 2003, commanding attention on stage with a horned Stroh violin, she first became a fixture on the international scene.

But the watershed moment was the 2007 release of her debut solo album Við og við (Now and Again), wider international release in 2009), produced by Sigur Rós’ Kjartan Sveinsson. It seemed to appear fully formed out of the ether, and became a local classic overnight, winning accolades such as ‘Best Alternative Album’ at the Iceland Music Awards, named ‘Record of the Year’ by Iceland’s principal daily newspaper and recognised as one of the decade’s 100 best albums by eMusic.

She followed the record up with a strict touring schedule, sharing the stage across Europe, America and Australia with artists like Dirty Projectors, Blonde Redhead, Sigur Rós, Air, CocoRosie, Jonathan Richman and Nick Cave’s group Grinderman. Even in massive concert halls full of crowds awaiting bombastic rock’n’roll, the magical grip of her solo show is something to behold.

Ólöf’s consecutive albums featured guests such as Ragnar Kjartansson and Björk (who famously described Ólöf as “somewhere between a child and an old woman”) and were met with gushing praise from the press and audiences alike–The New York Times! Vanity Fair! NME! Spin! Mojo! Paste! Guardian!–but by 2015 she found herself drifting towards other projects: founding the grassroots cultural space Mengi in Reykjavík, working as a copywriter, raising her son and step-daughter, and collaborating with her long-time friend (and now husband!) Skúli Sverrisson, for example on a piece written especially for Ólöf and the Icelandic Symphony Orchestra.

With her new album, Spíra (Sprout), produced by Skúli), Ólöf has found her joy in writing songs rekindled. In many ways it harkens back to her debut: it is exclusively in Icelandic, the arrangements are markedly stripped back compared to her last two records, and it is mostly recorded in single takes in the company of close collaborators and friends, much like her debut all those years ago.