RAKEL is an Icelandic artist working in song, memory, and atmosphere. Her music folds together voice, field recording, and emotion into layered compositions that feel intimate and expansive. She has become a quietly singular presence in the Icelandic music landscape, performing with artists like Nanna (Of Monsters and Men), Axel Flóvent, and Kaktus Einarsson. Her debut album - a place to be - released on Ólafur Arnalds’ OPIA Community in October 2025 and garnered widespread acclaim, with The Line of Best Fit calling her “Iceland’s next breakout star”.

a place to be is part diary, part landscape. Co-created with Danish producer and longtime collaborator Sara Flindt, the album is shaped by the acoustics of real places, her family's farm in Hrútafjörður, Sara’s Copenhagen dorm room, a friend's studio in Aarhus, woven into songs that resist structure and resolution. Birds, clocks, breath, soft synths, the creak of a floorboard, nothing is too small to become part of the composition. RAKEL’s work doesn’t try to explain itself. It invites you into a space where thought becomes sound, memory becomes movement, and music becomes a place to be, for now.

Vinyl designed by Aron Freyr Heimisson

Tracklist:
always
rescue remedy
i am only thoughts running through myself
11:11
pillows
brushstrokesmadeoflight
pickled peaches
touch=change
petrichor
staður