RAKEL
Genre: Pop
If you like: Laufey, Clairo, Faye Webster
What: Concert, Taste of Iceland Toronto
Where: El Mocambo, 464 Spadina Ave.
When: Thurs., Nov. 20
Why you should go: With her ambitious album that spans genres, RAKEL brings a little bit of Iceland to every performance. 

For ethereal Icelandic singer RAKEL, her career has been defined by one collaboration after another. In 2022, she released a collaborative album, While We Wait, with fellow up-and-comers in the Nordic music scene, Salóme Katrín and Zaar. Together they self-produced and self-released the album, creating it as a reflection on the struggles of the COVID-19 lockdowns and the journeys they each went on during that period. She’s also performed with numerous artists across the world, most notably with Nanna of the Icelandic band Of Monsters and Men. She’s works on solo material throughout this period, with her debut EP, Nothing Ever Changes in 2021, but her personal work has taken a back seat throughout her constant stream of collaborations. 

In 2025 however, she flipped the switch, releasing her debut album, a place to be. Now she’s expanding her solo career across the pond with her upcoming performance at the Icelandic Airwaves Off-Venue, a showcase of some of the most promising artists coming out of Iceland. The show is part of the Taste of Iceland Toronto, a festival spanning from Thurs., Nov. 20, through Sat., Nov. 22 celebrating all things Iceland. On a Zoom call with NEXT from Reykjavik before the show, she talks about the whirlwind year when she truly went solo. 

“It’s been so nice,” reflects RAKEL. “It’s a relief as well at the same time as I’ve been working on this album for some time now. It’s just nice to share it with people and to feel my community hold it and be excited about it with me. It’s a good feeling.”

RAKEL’s sound is acoustic driven, with a heavy focus on strings that often meshes with a low-fi, synth sound, best done in her albums highlight, pickled peaches. It creates an ambient mood, reminiscent of the open countryside of Iceland that inspires so much of RAKEL’s work. With this sound, her vocals mesh with it with their refined, deep sound that maintains a steady beat so that her music maintains a sense of tranquillity, never being overcome with melodrama. 

When going solo, RAKEL has kept collaboration and community at the heart of the music. Any answers she gives she links back to the support of her community, speaking with excitement and pride at being able to have them be part of her musical journey. When she speaks, she does so slowly, a sign of English being her second language, but it provides a clarity to her answers that further emphasize the care for her music and those who have supported her. Chief among those supporters Is longtime collaborator, Sara Flindt who helped produce RAKEL’s album. For Flindt, this was the first album she’d produced outside of her own project, so together, they were marking a bold new step in their careers. Both sought to bring a sense of their country into the album as they travelled back and forth from Reykjavik and Flindt’s home in Copenhagen to collaborate. 

“I started writing the songs for the album, I think it’s been three years since the first song came out of my head, so the production really took time,” RAKEL says. “We [RAKEL and Flindt] wanted to document this process because we recorded it in so many different places. We wanted people to feel the spaces that the songs were recorded in. With that in mind, we tried to implement that in the soundscapes of the album, and we want you to feel like you were there with us.”

The album thus becomes akin to a series of musical “field recordings” as RAKEL puts it, capturing parts of Iceland and Denmark within them. If there’s one song that emphasize this goal for RAKEL, its petrichor, a soft, acoustic-driven melody with minimalist vocals that transports you to a little corner of Icelandic called Staður.

“There’s a church in my mom’s childhood home in Staður, where I just came from doing a concert there last night with my friend and there’s a church on the land called Staðarkirkja. We recorded the song in there.” RAKEL explains. “Just me on guitar and singing and Sara playing the organ. The way we recorded and then produced the song was for the listener to feel like they were walking into the church, so you hear this room sound in the beginning of the song and then it kind of zooms in on us. It feels like you’re moving closer to us, and you can hear the sound of the floorboards and the walls and the birds outside and the closing of the door. That’s song really brings me into the church, and I can feel it really strongly there.”

As she embraces the growing place her solo work has in her life, RAKEL is still finding the balance in pursuing her own music and continuing to collaborate with other artists that has become such a big part of her career. For her, it’s finding that balance between diving into her “passion projects” while also involving as many people as possible with how she learns and grows as an artist. It’s a balance she remains unsure of going forward as she looks to get the balance right for herself. 

“I love to work with other people. It’s very important for me and, I really like doing it. But also, having now released my first, full-length album, I really want to try and play more and do more things, and that’s the dream to get to have more of a focus. I’m just very excited to see what happens, and I feel like the album’s being received in a really beautiful way.”

When she does focus more on collaborating with other artists, the Icelandic music community is as good a place as any for her to do it. It’s an old cliché that everyone in Iceland knows each other, but when it comes to describing what it’s like to work as an artist in Iceland, RAKEL doesn’t hesitate in describing it in exactly those terms. 

“It’s small. We all kind of know each other. It’s easy to just reach out and talk. You can ask someone for help or ask someone to collaborate on something; it feels accessible, like, you can reach out to people — and I feel like people are pretty open to collaborating and between genres. Like, it’s fun how things kind of meshed into each other, so it becomes, I don’t know, it just feels, like, bigger, and you’re not defined by a certain thing, you know? It’s nice to move around in it.”

It’s an openness that allows for a greater sense of experimentation that shines through in RAKEL’s album. While it is at its heart a pop album, it blends genres together in what is a highly ambitious debut. i am only thoughts running through myself moves things into techno territory with its synth-heavy backing music while always has a country-like quality with RAKEL’s harmonious vocals that mix effortlessly with the song’s melancholic strings. In carrying this sound of Iceland with her, this will be RAKEL’s first performance in Toronto. While she’s played abroad before, there’s still a sense of early-career jitters at taking this big step up, performance-wise, but it’s overcome by the excitement at allowing her to cross this milestone off her career. 

“It always feels a bit different to play abroad, but for me, it’s been this gradual thing where I feel like it’s organically happened in ways for me, even though I haven’t gone on a solo tour,” she says. “Having released the album and having that in my hands, I feel like I’m ready to do more of it. But playing abroad is always different because in Iceland, you always know so many people in the crowd, but playing for a crowd that you’re not familiar with, you’re kind of introducing yourself [to] is always a little bit more [nerve-wracking]. But you need to introduce yourself, and it’s a fun thing to do, to get to know other people through your music and reflect with that.”

So, what can a Toronto audience expect to hear when listening to RAKEL for the first time? RAKEL is once again carried by a sense of excitement while also once more harkening back to the power of collaboration, with Flindt joining her for the performance. Together, RAKEL promises to bring “a little bit of heartbreak” alongside a “cosy performance” to provide a little warmth and as the temperatures in both Toronto and Reykjavik begin to plummet. Once she’s performed in Toronto, RAKEL is ready to hunker down and prepare the next step in her career.

“I’m very excited about writing more songs,” she says. “I’m very excited about that. I’m in that kind of mode now, but maybe it’s because winter’s coming, or it kind of has arrived, you know, here in Iceland. I tend to go into this, like, kind of more introspective, like, hermit mode, and that kind of tickles that creative part of the brain where you’re like, ‘Okay, and now I feel like I have this more like kind of space to dwell in that and create.’ At the same time, I really want to play more. I’m hoping that next year, we’ll have some more of that.”

“Play more music, meet more people, collaborate and just share music” is the mantra behind RAKEL’s work and bringing her sounds to Canada marks the next stage in fulfilling it.