Icelandic composer and producer Ólafur Arnalds and the late Irish musician Eoin French, best known as Talos, have announced A Dawning, set for a July 11 release via Opia Community/Mercury KX.
The album is a profound meditation on friendship, loss, and experimentation — one that began as a collaboration and became a totem of their creative kinship following Talos’ passing last summer. Alongside the announcement, they have shared the album’s second single, “Signs.”
Arnalds shares about the track, “At its core, ‘Signs’ feels like a coming together, a curious meeting of creative souls. It’s filled with carefree experimentation and exploration. ‘Signs’ was the first song that Eoin and I wrote together. It was only shortly after we became friends and we were rather decisively paired together by our friend Mary Hickson at her music residency in Cork – she seemed very sure that we would get along musically. She was right, of course. It was the start of an incredible, inspiring, heartbreaking but heartfelt journey that took us places we could never have imagined in our wildest dreams. So it feels appropriate that it comes out as we announce this album that became the fruit of that journey.”
“Signs” follows the project’s first single “We Didn’t Know We Were Ready,” which features Niamh Regan, Ye Vagabonds, and a choir of collaborators. The track made its televised debut in January on RTÉ’s The Tommy Tiernan Show. During that performance, Arnalds and the featured artists were joined by Dermot Kennedy and The Staves.
The album process began in 2023, when French and Arnalds first started working together at Sounds from a Safe Harbour Festival in Cork. From there, they continued to work in Arnalds’ Reykjavík studio and later in French’s home in West Cork. Arnalds ultimately finished the album after French’s death in August 2024.
“We made this album together,” Arnalds says. “Even after, while I was there working on some arrangements, I never felt like I was truly alone. Near the end, where we were saying how grateful we were to have met each other, he told me, ‘You know, I’m still gonna be there.’”
Order Ólafur Arnalds and Talos’s album A Dawning now.
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