Hildur Guðnadóttir Presents Where to From, Her Eagerly Awaited Debut DG Studio Album
Where to From celebrates the creative power of friendship and artistic collaboration
The album comes out on 31 October 2025
Its music will form the core of a series of concerts given during the 2025–26 season
by Guðnadóttir and some of the musician friends who helped bring it to life in the studio
“The title Where to From suggests a sense of direction.
Whenever you create something, an idea comes from thin air and
becomes whatever it becomes, moving from where it begins to where it ends.”
Hildur Guðnadóttir
Deep friendships and creative collaboration proved decisive in shaping Hildur Guðnadóttir’s debut studio album for Deutsche Grammophon. Where to From consists of nine intimate and contemplative tracks written, arranged and produced by the Icelandic composer whose soundtrack scores have been recognised with, among other accolades, two Grammy Awards® (Chernobyl, Joker) and an Academy Award (Joker). Her new album is a highly personal yet universally resonant collection of works rooted in spontaneous musical ideas that were originally captured on her smartphone.
Also providing cello and/or vocals on several tracks, Guðnadóttir is joined on Where to From by close friends and long-time collaborators Liam Byrne (viola da gamba), Clare O’Connell (cello), Eyvind Kang (viola), and Jessika Kenney and Elsa Torp (vocals). Two other friends played key roles: Francesco Donadello recorded, mixed and mastered the album, while artist, choreographer and director Gisèle Vienne created its striking cover artwork.
Where to From will be released in all formats on 31 October 2025. Its accompanying booklet includes an interview between Guðnadóttir and film director Todd Field (TÁR), as well as more of Vienne’s atmospheric images – “her work is so deep, haunting and beautiful, it’s a great privilege to represent it on the album”, says the composer. A first single, “Make Space”, featuring all six musicians, will be available digitally on 19 September.
“The friendships that form when you work in collaboration are such a privilege,” explains Hildur Guðnadóttir. “There’s a special bond and a telepathy that connects you with others the more you perform with them. It’s magnificent when you’ve been playing with someone for 20 or 30 years and you witness how you and your friendship have evolved through the music you make together.”
Where to From grew from musical diary entries, some little more than melodic snippets, that Guðnadóttir sang into her phone’s voice recorder – traces of what she calls “the constant stream of music” that flows through her mind. When the time felt right, she turned to her collection, chose melodies that felt ripe for development and spent a month transforming them into exquisitely crafted compositions.
“The original seeds were planted in my phone across six or seven years,” she recalls. “After working on so many film soundtracks, it was interesting to take a completely different look at the way music comes to me. There’s a lot of space in the music that’s playing in my head, which I realised from listening to these phone recordings is the mind-space I would generally like to be in.”
“I love writing music to commission, but there are certain parameters set before you create it — a story or a timeline” she adds. “And then there’s the music that just arrives. The way that happens is as mysterious to me as it is to anyone else. It’s the music that wakes me up at night or flies into my head as I’m driving, walking or cycling. It always arrives unannounced!”
The ten-year break from creating a studio album prompted her to reflect on the purpose of her past solo recordings. She was encouraged by feedback from fellow artists, filmmakers Todd Field and Sarah Polley included, that they drew from her music as a source of inspiration for their own creativity, and from a biologist, who told her he had made a breakthrough in his study of photosynthesis while listening to one of her albums.
“Composing Where to From consequently felt like a creative dialogue with the people who will listen to this music in the future. It’s a big motivation to think that what I’m doing might inspire the work of others. That is all you can hope for by releasing anything into the world. That creating something might spark something else to be created. More ‘wheres’ and ‘froms’.”
This season Hildur Guðnadóttir and friends will perform the music from Where to From live, along with other key works “from two decades of exploring the relationship between strings and voices, and the space that music both creates and captures”. Tickets are on sale now for their concerts at the Volksbühne, Berlin (1/2 November); London’s Barbican Centre (21 March 2026); the Vienna Konzerthaus (26 April); and Reykjavík’s Harpa (6 June) – Hildur is Artist in Residence at the 2026 Reykjavík Arts Festival. She will also present Where to From at Amsterdam’s Muziekgebouw as part of next year’s Holland Festival (late June 2026).
