Particles

The Icelandic collaboration record's most immediate track, and the only one where a voice takes the foreground with real force. Nanna Bryndís Hilmarsdóttir — of Of Monsters and Men, but stripped here of that band's stadium percussion — sings in a high, slightly frayed upper register, holding notes just past the point of comfort so you hear the effort in them. Arnalds' arrangement stays out of her way for the first half: piano triads, a string pad, space. Then strings gather into a long crescendo and the track opens into something genuinely huge, though it never resorts to drums to get there. The lyric turns on dissolution — bodies, memory, feeling reduced to particles that scatter and remain — and the imagery is cosmological in a way that suits an album recorded across seven Icelandic locations over seven months. Hilmarsdóttir's Icelandic-accented English gives certain vowels an unusual roundness that makes the words feel handled rather than merely sung. This is the track from Arnalds' catalog most likely to reach someone who doesn't listen to instrumental music; it is also the one most suited to headphones on a train at dusk, watching landscape blur past, when the crescendo lands exactly as the light goes.