Nanna, in full bloom

There was something remarkable, she thought, about this ever-evolving thing, this space that took care, curation and no small feat of patience. But how do you begin? How do you build something from nothing at all? The Icelandic singer-songwriter’s debut solo record is means of sinking her fingers into the soil; of starting something in uncertainty, but carrying on in blind faith.

You won’t be used to seeing Nanna Bryndís Hilmarsdóttir alone. She fronts one of Iceland’s defining bands of the past decade, Of Monsters And Men, whose delicately embroidered folk songs collided with confetti-canon bombast to global acclaim. Barely touching their twenties, the band’s 2011 debut album My Head Is An Animal catapulted their sound to several millions around the world - and so they were called to go and see it for themselves. Untethered from home, hurtling from city to city, performance to performance, Nanna lost sight of how this all started: being alone.

The Icelandic are no strangers to solitude. Their homes are humbled by vast swathes of land hemmed by an unfathomably vaster ocean, and Nanna’s hometown of Garður – ‘the Garden’ – is no different. “There was nothing around my house, really. Just rocks, the ocean and his big lighthouse,” she recalls. “You have endless time, and so as a child I was immediately drawn to writing and music.”

As a teenager, she moved out of her family home to an abandoned US army base with a few students; it was a hollow building in a ghost town with white carpets (a curious novelty in Iceland), but it marked her first claim of independence. Under the moniker Songbird, she would play the bars of Reykjavík and try to meet as many like-minded artists as she could. “I was very eager to do this,” Nanna reflects, “and desperately tried to find people that liked the same stuff as me who I could relate to.”

When she met the musicians who would form Of Monsters and Men, her search came to an end: their synchronicity was such that within their first weeks of working together, they’d won Músíktilraunir, Iceland’s annual battle of the bands competition. Together, they built something bigger than themselves.

“It was never a choice. It just kind of happens,” she shrugs. “But I always felt I would one day return to my solo work. I missed that part of me and my creative expression.” The seed of How To Start A Garden was sewn as the tour for Of Monsters and Men’s third album FEVER DREAM; on the road, she would while away the hours crafting a world that was, for the first time in over a decade, entirely her own. “The thing with [Of Monsters and Men] is that everything is very outward and extroverted. When we’re onstage it’s a joyful interaction with people, and I feel like that does bleed into my solo album but in a different way,” she explains. “I want people to enter that world, too, but it’s more delicate, quiet and fragile. I’m actually a very introverted person, and I really enjoy the smaller moments in life.”

Nanna understands the value of a secret, and for a long time, How To Start A Garden was a closely-guarded one. “I love keeping things to myself because I think, at the start, that’s how music should be. It wasn’t for anyone else. I liked the idea that I could make an album and decide not to release it if I didn’t want to, and nobody even knew I was doing it. I had the mentality that if it doesn’t make sense, if I hated it, then nothing was lost. So it was very freeing, in that way,” she says. “I don’t think I’ve had that for a very long time with the band: it’s like, we’re working on an album and then immediately people expect something from it. So I just needed something different.”

She often describes the album as a “world”, a private sanctuary to escape to. Though the seed of How To Start A Garden was planted long before, it took the pandemic, the circus grinding to a halt, for Nanna to begin spiriting it to life. “In those years, it felt like you were on borrowed time,” she reflects. “When you were doing something, you felt like you could do it forever. Time just evaporated; the world felt so unreal.”

Much of it was written in her cabin, alone, save for her black Labrador Vofa (‘Ghost’). Nanna would record the sounds of Vofa’s feet tapping on the floor, the creaking of the wood and the chatter of her friends when she was able to visit them in the Westfjords. The spaces she inhabited in this time feel like a presence in themselves.

The turbulence in the world beyond was macrocosmic of what was happening within her own. “It was a weird time in my life,” she says. “There was a lot of uncertainty. I left a relationship that I’d been in for most of my adult life, and while I was moving houses I was saying in this Airbnb downtown – I felt like a tourist in my own home. It was a series of moments that had never happened before, and everything felt very heightened.”

The album unfurls to tell a story. Its opening track begins with the chirping of birds, the gentle patter of rain, errant laughter and distant chatter that emerge and recede like memories. “I really wanted to make people feel like they were entering something, entering the album,” says Nanna, who self-produced much of the record herself.

These details, tender and intimate, were then given finishing touches with production from Josh Kaufman and, later, The National’s Aaron Dessner. “I was at a point in the album where I’d spent so much time alone,” she recalls. “I was kind of under the impression that once you make a solo album, you should do it all by yourself – and then I realised that nobody actually does that! It’s impossible, and also horribly boring, having to do everything on your own.”

The opening track is bookended by “Seabed” – “a little ghost story I made up,” she says. When I ask her about the tone it leaves the album on, she answers: “Both sad and hopeful. The story doesn’t feel finished; it never finishes.” As it retreats to the same soft sound of rainfall it begins, completing an eternal cycle. “I think that’s how life is: nothing is ever perfectly wrapped up. Sometimes, things are just sad and they don’t go the way you wanted it to. When I was feeling overwhelmed about releasing the album, somebody said to me, ‘Well, there’s always shit in the pearl.’”

“Winter cold, the hole so warm, she buries herself in snow / Dives into the weather cold, he sinks into the ocean / I lay up against my chin, soft is the moor / Walk now homeward bound and the ghost choir sings…”

The mantra it ends with is sung in Icelandic, one of the few times Nanna has ever committed her mother tongue to record. “I feel kind of shy about it,” she explains. “I think it feels very vulnerable, which doesn’t really make sense because, of course, when you’re singing in English more people understand it. But I never felt that I was able to write in Icelandic in a way that felt good enough to me. Singing in Icelandic kind of feels like my childhood, a bit, and I really wanted this album to have all these snippets of my life. At the very end, it reminds me so much of playing outside of my house where there was nothing except the moss and the rocks.”

Growing up, she was fascinated by ghost stories. This one, she tells me, is about “somebody walking out into nothing and laying their head down on a mossy rock to fall asleep.” Her grandfather would make up stories for her, with one in particular she remembers about a ghost with blue eyes helping a little girl who feels alone and out of place to play piano; barely-concealed encouragement for Nanna to pursue music.

This nascent fascinated only deepened as she grew older because of what ghost stories represent for Iceland both culturally and psychologically. “Okay, now you’re getting me started because I get very excited about this!” she says. She tells me of the Icelandic sagas which she compares to Grimms’ Fairy Tales, foundational folkloric texts which reflect the nation’s anxieties. “There is always a lesson; it’s your conscience that haunts you,” she says. “When you live in a mud hut, often in the dark, of course your mind goes crazy. I just couldn’t stop thinking about them – the mystery of the things you don’t see.”

In many ways, to complete this album Nanna retreated to that place of child-like curiosity. “This was the easiest album I’ve ever made,” she says, “but in many ways, also the hardest. I would overthink when it was no longer my little secret.” She confesses to parts of herself that many would prefer to be left unspoken. “For what it’s worth, when I’m cold outside / And my nose is bleeding and I’m tired / With no encore and no neon sign / You’re rooting for me, even when I’m not right”, she sings on “Godzilla.” This self-deprecation is refracted on “Crybaby”, where she punishes herself for the hypocrisy of returning to someone though she insists she doesn’t have a problem with being alone.

“I’d say I’m pretty hard on myself most of the time,” she shrugs. “But I try not to take myself too seriously. I think that’s what I’m always trying to work on, to snap out of things and be like, ‘This is not that serious’.” The lyrics to her song “Igloo”, where she admits, “I know you must hate me now / I kind of hate me too”, makes her cringe sometimes. “But it’s nice to say things for what they are,” she concludes. “I wasn’t interested in glossing over things to make myself seem big and powerful because that’s not how I felt a lot of the time. I honestly wasn’t thinking very far about who was gonna hear it; I would just allow myself to go to places and say things I was feeling and deal with the rest later.”

How To Start A Garden may strike you as a break-up album, but for Nanna, that was only a small part of a wider tapestry of her storytelling. “I think the bigger picture is about stripping everything away and questioning who you are at the end of it all. This album feels very much about my relationship with myself, almost like being a child again and wondering, ‘How do I even do any of this?’” she explains.

It's an album concerned with beginnings, yes, but with that implies an end. I ask her what she has learned about the nature of both: “It’s a part of life. There’s a beginning, a middle and an end – all of this just makes you more appreciative of the middle part, to enjoy things while they’re happening. But I’ve also learned to not run from endings, because when something ends, something new will naturally begin. You know, its never really ever. Things just change. Even with the seasons: it will be spring again, but a new flower might crop up this year that you’ve never seen before. Like, ‘Oh, there’s a new weird thing that’s growing over there. I don’t know if I like it, but still, it might become one of my favourites.’”

Likewise, Nanna is no longer the same person; there have been new blooms sprouting in her life. For her solo career, this is only the beginning: “I can’t really shut it off now. I’m obsessed with meeting new people and working on new things. It’s very strange to start something; I’d been in this band for so many years and everything felt so set in stone, and with this album it completely stripped away all that comfort. On the other side of axis-tilting change, she believes she is more stoic than ever. “I’m more accepting of things in life and I think it has changed me in a way that I’m more appreciative of the smallest things. It’s a much deeper thing for me, something I’ve been craving.”

The outro of “Disaster Master” feels like an arrival at something like peace: “Can I go off the path, find a breeze / Start with nothing, start a garden / The ghost and me / She is silent, my head silent finally.”