INSPIRATION / A PROFILE BY ROB URBAN
Hildur
Guðnadóttir
An idea is worth
listening to.
Even before you know what it will become.
Before Hildur Guðnadóttir’s music reached audiences through Joker and Chernobyl, a friend helped persuade her to share a record she had made alone.
Her account of that beginning credits Skúli Sverrisson with encouraging her to release the music that became Mount A in 2006. She had grown up playing with other people and wanted some space to hear her own thoughts. The record emerged from that space.
I find the friendship in that story as moving as the solitary work. Someone makes something personal. Someone else hears enough in it to say: let people listen.
Guðnadóttir’s career gives that exchange many forms. She is an Icelandic composer, cellist and singer whose work can feel intensely inward while depending on a remarkable openness to the people and places around her.
WHERE TO FROM
Keep the
passing thought.
Her 2025 account of Where to From offers another view of the method. Guðnadóttir describes recording passing musical ideas on her phone to preserve their timing. When Eyvind Kang and Jessika Kenney were going to be in Europe, she wanted to make music with them; Else Torp, Liam Byrne and Clare O’Connell joined the group for which she arranged selections from that audio diary.
The order matters. A moment of sound is preserved. Particular people become available. The arrangement develops with those people in mind. Instrumentation grows from a relationship as well as from a list of pitches that need to be played.
A friend’s presence can be part of the reason a piece takes shape. The instrument arrives with a person attached: their phrasing, their patience, the history of playing together.
An audio note can preserve a hesitation that written shorthand might smooth away. A musician can hear the distance between two gestures, the pace of an unfinished phrase or the point at which an idea loses its certainty. Bringing those details into an arrangement requires deciding what is essential and what can change when another person takes the line.
There is a lovely kind of practicality here. The phone catches the idea while it is still small. The arrangement gives it somewhere to go. A passing thought does not have to announce itself as important before it deserves to be kept.
CHERNOBYL / IGNALINA
The room already
had a sound.
For Chernobyl, that willingness to listen took her to the Ignalina nuclear power plant in Lithuania. Her account of the music’s live presentation credits the contribution of field recordist Chris Watson and score collaborator Sam Slater.
In a 2019 interview with Pop Disciple, she described wanting to hear the sounds the space already made. She recorded there and spent months working with the material. The place became a source of the score’s musical identity.
That approach is part of why I admire her. A commission can tempt an experienced person to arrive with an answer ready. Guðnadóttir was willing to let the subject change what she would make.
The care also had a human purpose. She spoke about the responsibility of writing music for a catastrophe people had lived through. Listening became a way to approach their story with attention, allowing the space, fear and grief to guide her choices.
There is considerable imagination in recognizing that a sound already present might be the one the story needs. Finding it takes a different sort of confidence from filling every silence.
THIS WILL BE US
Twenty years
later, someone
can answer.
Twenty years after Mount A, Guðnadóttir has returned to a wish she carried while making those early records: to hear other people play the parts she had assembled herself.
This Will Be Us, announced for October 23, 2026, brings orchestral versions of earlier music together with two new compositions.
I like the tenderness of returning to an earlier ambition this way. The young artist had already made something complete. Now she can give those musical ideas another kind of life, with the people and possibilities available to her today.
For This Will Be Us, Guðnadóttir plays solo cello and produces; Ames conducts the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin. Francesco Donadello recorded, mixed and mastered the album. Ólafur Elíasson created the cover artwork, and Sarah Polley contributes liner notes alongside Guðnadóttir.
Those credits describe different kinds of attention. Playing a line, balancing a recording and finding an image for its cover are separate decisions. The composer can remain at the center while the work gains from people who hear and see it differently.
The ensemble changes what can happen between the parts. A phrase can be shaped by another player’s breath or touch. The composer gets to hear a response.
Follow the people,
too.
What draws me to Guðnadóttir is the attention she gives an idea before it has become impressive. A note on a phone, the sound of a room, an early piece that still holds a wish: each can reward another moment of listening.
Her practice also makes room for different needs. Solitude can help a person discover what they hear. Friendship can make it possible to share. Collaboration can reveal something that the original maker could not have supplied alone.
For a way into that long conversation, Mount A offers the early voice. The orchestral version of Floods, released in September 2026, is a standalone companion to the forthcoming album. Her account of Where to From gives another entrance, through the musicians she wanted to play with.
I would follow the people as well as the compositions. Their names are part of how a private sound reaches the rest of us.
The music in this profile
Who is Hildur Guðnadóttir?
Hildur Guðnadóttir is an Icelandic composer, cellist and singer. Her work includes solo recordings, collaborations and scores for film and television, including Joker and Chernobyl.
What is This Will Be Us?
This Will Be Us is an orchestral album by Hildur Guðnadóttir announced for release on October 23, 2026. It revisits earlier music alongside two new compositions, with Robert Ames conducting the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin.
When was Mount A first released?
Mount A was originally released in 2006 under the name Lost in Hildurness. It is Guðnadóttir’s debut solo album. Deutsche Grammophon issued a vinyl edition in July 2026.
Sources: Guðnadóttir’s accounts of This Will Be Us, Where to From and Chernobyl; Deutsche Grammophon’s album catalog; Pop Disciple’s 2019 interview; and Universal Music Canada’s September 2026 release note, linked throughout.
I’m Rob Urban. I’m interested in the small choices that give meaningful work its character. You can read more about my work here, or get in touch about writing and consulting.