Icelandic composer and producer Ólafur Arnalds and the late Irish musician Eoin French, greatest generally known as Talos, have introduced A Dawning, set for a July 11 launch by way of Opia Neighborhood/Mercury KX.
The album is a profound meditation on friendship, loss, and experimentation — one which started as a collaboration and have become a totem of their inventive kinship following Talos’ passing final summer season. Alongside the announcement, they’ve shared the album’s second single, “Signs.”
Arnalds shares in regards to the monitor, “At its core, ‘Signs’ feels like a coming together, a curious meeting of creative souls. It’s filled with carefree experimentation and exploration. ‘Signs’ was the first song that Eoin and I wrote together. It was only shortly after we became friends and we were rather decisively paired together by our friend Mary Hickson at her music residency in Cork – she seemed very sure that we would get along musically. She was right, of course. It was the start of an incredible, inspiring, heartbreaking but heartfelt journey that took us places we could never have imagined in our wildest dreams. So it feels appropriate that it comes out as we announce this album that became the fruit of that journey.”
“Signs” follows the venture’s first single “We Didn’t Know We Were Ready,” which options Niamh Regan, Ye Vagabonds, and a choir of collaborators. The monitor made its televised debut in January on RTÉ’s The Tommy Tiernan Present. Throughout that efficiency, Arnalds and the featured artists have been joined by Dermot Kennedy and The Staves.
The album course of started in 2023, when French and Arnalds first began working collectively at Sounds from a Secure Harbour Pageant in Cork. From there, they continued to work in Arnalds’ Reykjavík studio and later in French’s residence in West Cork. Arnalds in the end completed the album after French’s loss of life in August 2024.
“We made this album together,” Arnalds says. “Even after, while I was there working on some arrangements, I never felt like I was truly alone. Near the end, where we were saying how grateful we were to have met each other, he told me, ‘You know, I’m still gonna be there.’”
Order Ólafur Arnalds and Talos’s album A Dawning now.
