! Official Site | Facebook! | Twitter "There's an increasing sense in this world that you have to make yourself into a citizen of glass. To be willing to open up, to let everybody see you, to use yourself as material, and not just if you're an artist or a musician. Everything about our lives these days seems to be about revealing the private self, the self in every little detail. It's the new !way we're meant to embrace" Agnes Obel's mind is whirring and whirling, but she sounds determined, excited. "And in all that was an idea that wouldn't! let me go." This staggeringly talented No.1 artist across Europe, and a great live success already in the UK, returns with a bigger sound, a bigger canvas and, for the first time, a concept for her astonishing third album. 'Citizen Of Glass' follows 2013's gorgeously intimate, piano-and-voice-led masterpiece 'Aventine', and 2010's stunningly detailed, delicate debut 'Philharmonics', records which had huge commercial success in Obel's home country of Denmark, as well as France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Switzerland (plus breathless critical notices in the UK). This time around, Obel's world is wider, her vision broadening to new horizons, her message! more universal. The title came first. During her last European tour, Obel read a piece of journalism about the term glserner brger, meaning the glass human or citizen in German, describing the level of privacy an indi- vidual has in a state or a country. It is also a term used in healthcare to describe how much is known about a patient's body or biology or history. In other words, if a person is completely made of glass, Obel explains, we know everything! about them. "And I thought that's such a good term in so many other ways," she continues. "I sort of feel like that about my work very much – that I am being expected to made of glass - but also in my private life too. Everyone's expected so much to reveal of their autobiography now. It's like a camera being in the room at all times. That makes us change! so much as people." Divulging things in that way has never come naturally to Obel anyway; she's never been one for social media, or direct, intimate lyrics. Nevertheless, she's started to accept that her music comes from her own experiences, rather from the abstract, she says. She's also decided to work with that idea, and try to reveal something about herself, !in the best way she knows how. So in early 2015, work proper began. From day one, Obel wanted to work with her chosen title, as she puts it, "in a very new way." She started recording songs in her warehouse flat in Berlin, developing them later in the city's BrandNewMusic studios in Mitte, and doing so with an almost completely new set of musicians. Clarinets and bass clarinets add depth to the quivering of violins and cellos, while sam- ples of medieval harpsichords and harps give the overall mood a brittle edge. Obel also plays the spinet and celesta, and processes her voice on the record, pitching it lower to let her duet with herself on 'Fa- miliar', and higher elsewhere to make! it sound more jittery and urgent. Obel also includes a new keyboard instrument for her, on this album: the extraordinary Trautonium, a fragile, metal-keyed synthesiser from the late 1920s of which only two models exist. It makes sounds that shiver eerily like glass, showing how much Obel wanted the album's concept to be present in its sound. Glass holds many qualities that were ripe to explored emotionally and lyrically too, Obel thought: it is bold, transparent and bright, but also fragile and vulnerable. It's just like we are, she explains, just like she is trying! to be. 'Citizen Of Glass' became an album about how we see ourselves, and how we see other people, and how love and emotions work in this peculiar new world. 'Stone' is about how love links things together. 'Golden Green' is about how we see other people's lives being much better than ours. 'Mary tells' us about the life of Obel's "high school heart" but how "nothing is over". The title track is about a "black drop" from that same heart, and !the desperate power of sadness. It's not that these songs are nakedly revealing, although a few of them are very personal - some of Obel's friends didn't make connections she thought they would when she played some for them. But this doesn't matter. Obel wants people to take these songs on for themselves, to sense the power in their in- tentions, and to absorb their resonances and emotions as much as they can. The whole record's mood is longing and intense to this end, its rich soundscapes ready to crack your composure, and shatter ideas sharply into! your soul. Later this year, Obel will tour 'Citizen Of Glass' across Europe with her new band, ambitiously bringing her wider, broader world to more of us, too. For here we all are, bold and transparent, fragile and vul- nerable, ready to hear her. And here she is now, opening! up, letting everyone see her, not letting us go.

For press information contact [email protected] Ellie Jones . Stay Loose . +44 7849 844 143 6A Westfield Park, Redland, Bristol, UK, BS6 6LT Downloadable assets: www.stayloose.co.uk!