Nanna announced today, her debut solo album How To Start A Garden, will drop on May 5 via Republic Records. The full-length was produced by Nanna alongside Aaron Dessner (The National, Taylor Swift) and Josh Kaufman (​Bonny Light Horseman, War on Drugs, Hiss Golden Messenger).

New single “Crybaby” was written by Nanna in a small cabin outside of her hometown of Reykjavík, Iceland, a place where she found profound inspiration. The song made its journey back-and-forth across the pond as it was recorded in producer Aaron Dessner’s famous New York-based Long Pond Studio before heading back to Iceland where Nanna added finishing touches.

“I wrote the song in my cabin. I had gone there to spend some time alone, and I remember lying on my floor playing the guitar and feeling sorry for myself. It felt dramatic and a bit funny, so I called the song ‘Crybaby’ as a way of making fun of myself,” said Nanna. “This influenced a lot of the record, this thing of not taking yourself so seriously when you feel very serious.”

The video accompanying the track, directed by Icelandic director Thora Hilmarsdóttir, finds Nanna dancing on her own under a static mirror ball at a sparsely attended party. While Nanna tries to connect and be noticed by the people there, she seemingly exists alone in her thoughts and actions as the world carries on around her.

After a childhood in a tiny town in rural Iceland, Nanna spent most of her twenties in recording studios and on global tours with her multi-platinum band, Of Monsters and Men, which arrived in 2011 to almost immediate ubiquity as their first album, My Head Is An Animal, topped charts worldwide. Their live prowess landed them headlining festival spots around the world. With three impressive and globally successful albums under their belt, Nanna found herself writing an album she felt needed to be delivered in her very own way. Like most of us, the years since 2020 have necessitated changes both mundane and enormous; like few of us, Nanna, as at home on a festival stage as in a rural cabin, is fluent in polarity.

In her cabin outside of Reykjavik, in the company of her dog named Vofa – the Icelandic word for ghost – Nanna reveled in the quiet, a liminal period between lives. The result is an absolute snowstorm of an album—chilling and crystalline, almost terrifying in moments, while achingly calm in others.

“A lot of things had to end for this album to become what it is,” said Nanna. A long term relationship, my prior sense of home and belonging. But it’s also an ode to the joy of new beginnings: new relationships, a new home, new friendships, a new sense of self. The album takes place in this in-between state. It captures a very specific time in my life of curiosity and reflection, when I felt very much in the middle of a surreal new reality and didn’t have a clear path in my direction—like how a snowstorm is somehow chaotic but calm at the same time.”

Nanna
How To Start A Garden
Track Listing
Republic Records

“How To Start A Garden” (Written and produced by Nanna, Additional Production by Josh Kaufman)
“Sputnik” (Written and Produced by Nanna, Additional Production by Josh Kaufman)
“Crybaby” (Written by Nanna, Produced by Nanna and Aaron Dessner)
“Disaster Master” (Written by Nanna, Produced by Josh Kaufman)
“The Vine / 13” (Written by Nanna & Ragnar Thorhallson, Produced by Nanna)
“Godzilla” (Written and Produced by Nanna)
“Bloodclot / Andvaka” (Written and Produced by Nanna)
“Milk” (Written by Nanna and Aaron Dessner, Produced by Aaron Dessner)
“Igloo” (Written and Produced by Nanna)
“Voyager” (Written by Nanna, Produced by Josh Kaufman)
“Seabed” (Written by Nanna, Aaron Dessner & Ragnar Thorhallson, Produced by Nanna and Aaron Dessner)

Pre-order How To Start A Garden by Nanna HERE