It’s been about two and a half years since the Icelandic songwriter Jófríður Ákadóttir made her solo debut as JFDR with Brazil. Recently, she’s been gearing up for a new release, first teasing it with “Taking A Part Of Me” — which ranked amongst our favorite songs that week. Today, she’s back with official news about that long-awaited sophomore effort.

JFDR’s next collection is called New Dreams, and it’ll be out in March (almost three years to the day from Brazil, as it happens). “This record is more thought out,” Ákadóttir said in a press release. “The person who’s singing is more honest, not as ‘coated’ or ‘poetic’ as on Brazil. It’s less eloquent, perhaps, but more what’s happening for me right now.”

Along with the announcement, Ákadóttir shared another new single called “My Work.” It’s a song she’s been playing for a while, and as it turns out, that might make it a pretty crucial segue from JFDR’s earlier days to where the project is now. Here’s what Ákadóttir had to say about it:

“My Work” marks a somewhat transitional moment, where I was pushing myself to my limits, traveling constantly, running away from my home, from my demons. I had been working on these chords for a little bit, I was smoking a cigarette in my friend Aaron’s loft in Brooklyn, I had spent a few weeks there and it was getting colder. I remember a very beautiful loneliness; I was excited to be there, but it was all foreign to me. And I was looking out the window and thinking about death, the cigarette triggered this I guess, but I had also been thinking about naiveté and innocence and glorifying something I was (or thought I was) before I experienced sadness and loneliness in the adult way.

I was thinking about my mother, how a mother can only be as happy as her saddest child, and I felt sorry, I felt how that was sadder than me being sad. The song reminds me of those moments I was living at the loft, in all weathers, on the stairway looking at the city in the distance, on the roof, in Aaron’s room, in my room, in the evening or night time, smoking, existing, wondering what I was doing there, processing this magical yet heart-wrenching lack of belonging, was it what I wanted?

Born from a moment of existential reckoning, “My Work” is a fittingly quiet and ruminative piece of work. Over gentle guitars, Ákadóttir’s vocals grow, layering into a refrain that repeats the same two lines over and over: “I stare into nothing and slow down my thoughts/ As I turn off the light and get on with my work.”

You could take it as a depiction of how we lose ourselves, bit by bit and then suddenly over the course of years, our ideas of ourselves eventually becoming unrecognizable. The slow current of the song mimics the way we can push off life decisions because of the tasks, the ideas of what we’re supposed to achieve, sitting right in front of us at all times. Or, maybe, it’s a reclamation — Ákadóttir seizing onto writing as a reminder of who she is, of who she’s supposed to become. “My Work” comes with a video directed by Anna Maggý. Check it out below.

TRACKLIST:

01 “Care For You”
02 “Taking A Part Of Me”
03 “Think Too Fast”
04 “My Work”
05 “Gravity”
06 “Juno”
07 “Dive In”
08 “Falls (No Wonder)”
09 “Shimmer”
10 “I Wish I’d See The Way You See Me”
11 “Drifter”

New Dreams is out 3/13 via White Sun Recording. Pre-order it here.