Agnes Obel details new album The Meaning Of Flowers

Danish musician Agnes Obel has detailed her fifth album, The Meaning of Flowers, due September 18, describing it as a record shaped by becoming a mother.

The album follows 2020's Myopia, which explored isolation and insomnia. This time, Obel said she wanted to explore the connections between living things, a shift she traces back to her pregnancy. "The experience from pregnancy made my brain and consciousness feel really changed," she said, adding that she wanted to see if she could recreate that feeling in the music itself, describing the process as something close to being reborn.

That reset shows up most clearly in the album's instrumentation. Piano, the instrument that has anchored Obel's sound since 2010, is largely absent from nearly half the songs. "It just didn't fit with this experience, with the different things I wanted to express," she said, pointing to the track "Laymelli" as an example where synthesizers and bass better captured what she was after than piano could.

Violinist John Corban became a key collaborator on the record, brought in during the later stages to build out arrangements that Obel described wanting to feel like "romantic strings, but really enormous," despite using just one string player layered into something closer to an orchestra.

Obel remains reluctant about the public side of her career even as the new album pushes her sound somewhere different. "I don't really like the visibility, I don't think it's nice, to be honest," she said, comparing her temperament to a backing musician in a band full of extroverts rather than a frontwoman. The Meaning of Flowers arrives September 18, giving indie listeners a fuller picture of the shift Obel has been describing since Myopia.