Last year, Icelandic legends Sigur Rós returned with ÁTTA, their first new album in a decade. Today, frontman Jónsi is getting back into releasing solo music and announcing the follow-up to his 2021 surprise LP Obsidian. The new Jónsi album is called First Light, and it was originally conceived as the score for a video game before becoming its own thing.

Jónsi is releasing First Light through Lakeshore Records and through Myndstream, a “health and wellbeing music provider.” I guess that means it’s meant for meditation? I could see it. I could also see it as a video-game score. The new tracks “Flicker” and “Cherry Blossom” are impressionistic orchestral pieces with no vocals. It’s a little frustrating that someone with a voice like that isn’t singing, but the tracks are pretty, and they would’ve made great video-game music.

In a press release, Jónsi says:

Writing this music at a time of manmade global turmoil and unrest for a video game, I imagined First Light as a momentary fantastical, over-the-top, utopian world where everyone and everything lives together in everlasting peace and harmony — choosing beauty over disorder, hope over fear, our universal divine angel guardians watching over us and connecting us all as one through love, melody, and music.

Below, check out “Flicker,” “Cherry Blossom,” and the First Light tracklist.

TRACKLIST:
01 “Flicker”
02 “First Light”
03 “Green Meadow”
04 “Clearing”
05 “Cherry Blossom”
06 “In Plain View”
07 “Wishful Thinking”
08 “Forest Trill”
09 “Undercurrent”
10 “Willow”
11 “Stillness”
12 “Floweret”
13 “Over The Fence”
14 “Flutterby”

First Light is out 8/30 on Myndstream/Lakeshore Records.