Swedish-Icelandic Artist Freyr Shares Instrumental Single “Departure”
April 16, 2021 BY Nettwerk
Ahead of his debut album release Nicotine Bunker on May 28th the Swedish-Icelandic singer-songwriter Freyr today shares his new instrumental single ”Departure.” On his debut full-length he imbues the sights, sounds and feelings of his journey into eight beautiful tracks, pre-save here.
The new single ”Departure” captures one´s imagination with mesmerizing nylon-stringed guitar picking, some percussions and a modified baryton ukulele. As the song title already implies, ”Departure” is both the last single before finally releasing his anticipated debut album Nicotine Bunker and the last track on the album itself. It softly wraps up the singer-songwriter´s journey to the Pacific Northwest and his debut record. ”The year I wrote ‘Departure‘ I had travelled quite a lot in the world and as I was heading over to Vancouver to record. I knew that there would be at least one track dedicated to travel. This one is about floating over deep blue clouds with the moon right above”, says Freyr.
The story of Freyr springs from a true journey as magnificent, magnetic, and magical as any myth on the books. In fact, his personal mythos already spans an enriching childhood divided between the deepest forests of Sweden and Icelandic summers, formative years playing everything from jazz and classical to metal and indie, a stint in Stockholm studying philosophy, and first trips across the ocean to record his debut album in North America.
Freyr picked up electric guitar at twelve. He eventually moved into “a music collective” called Lärkträdet (The Larch) in Umeå, among a diverse congregation of jazz purists and rappers. While majoring in philosophy at Stockholm University, he wrote and recorded music, which drew inspiration from his own experiences, as well as artists like Bon Iver and Sigur Rós. He caught the attention of producer Tyler Neil Johnson [Joshua Hyslop, Austin Basham] and cut his first formal single “Over My Head.” Following independent success to the tune of 200K+ streams, he signed to Nettwerk and released the I’m Sorry EP in early 2020.