Axel Flóvent grew up in Húsavík, a small town on Iceland’s northern coast, spent years in Reykjavík and abroad, and then returned. Fleeing the Shore, his first self-produced EP, was written and recorded in the same house where he now lives, with instruments in a room rather than a studio, and the decision to keep the songs in the space where they were born is the most important creative choice he made. The result is the most nakedly intimate work of his career, closer to the core, a little more naïve, and rooted in the particular stillness of a place you left and came back to find both familiar and changed.
The EP was produced entirely by Flóvent himself, a first for an artist who has spent his previous releases working with outside producers. Previous projects, including his two albums You Stay by the Sea and Away From This Dream, were shaped partly by collaborators who took his ideas to another space and time. Here, there is no translation. The songs stayed in the room where they were written, and the production reflects that: not the greatest mics, not the greatest room sound, just instruments and a voice and the quiet of Húsavík. The sonic signature of the EP is deliberate understatement.
Flóvent has described the EP with three words: change, self-isolation, and solitude. The tracklist maps those themes across six songs without forcing a narrative arc onto them. “Another Year” opens the collection with the weight that title implies, the passing of time measured not in events but in shifts of perspective. The title track follows, carrying the ambivalence of departure and return, fleeing something and arriving somewhere that turns out to be a version of where you started.
“Nowhere” and “Over One Night” sit at the EP’s center and carry its most introspective quality. Flóvent’s writing process involves improvised lyrics that begin as nonsense until they make sense, chasing emotional truth inside phrases he doesn’t fully understand before committing to them. The results tend to prioritize how a line feels over what it literally means, which gives the quieter moments on this EP a quality of being overheard rather than performed. “Reassurance” and closing track “In the Grass” bring the collection toward something approaching stillness, the solitude that has surrounded the whole project arriving at a resting point rather than a resolution.
The influences that have shaped Flóvent’s sound, Bon Iver, Adrianne Lenker, Bombay Bicycle Club, are audible in the broad sense without being directly traceable in the specific. The Nordic atmosphere is present not as an aesthetic choice but as a geographic fact. He made this record in northern Iceland, and it sounds like northern Iceland, the wide-open landscape seeping into the arrangements the way place always seeps into music made honestly in a specific location.
Fleeing the Shore is the sixth EP in a body of work that began with “Forest Fires” in 2015, a song that has now accumulated over 90 million streams and pulled listeners into the world Flóvent has been quietly building ever since. The scale of that reach sits in interesting contrast to the deliberate smallness of this project: a self-produced record made alone in a house in a small northern town, not for anyone in particular, as an act of returning to something essential. What that something is becomes clearer across twenty-five minutes without ever being fully named, which is probably as it should be.
Fleeing the Shore is available now via Nettwerk.
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