iris (113)

She is Norway’s most visionary young songwriter, and her debut LP comes at the tail end of a tumultuous year. "love and other disasters" is iris’s masterpiece, her most commercial and mature work yet – a dive into human nature by one who feels things deeply, but with a new critical distance, a wry sense of humour and a big helping of sexy R&B. iris works with the themes that have always driven her music – the things we do for love, and the things love does to us – but this time, the drama is writ large. At the release of her EP "femme florale" in 2019, the 25 year-old from Bergen remarked, “I sometimes feel like the ocean, shifting and changing – change is almost an instinct for me”. Now, there is something solid at her centre, and here are the songs to prove it.
 It’s been a whirlwind three years for iris, who streamed 4 million times in the first eight months of her campaign and supported Aurora (16) on an international tour. But most of the songs on love and other disasters were created during the short, intense chaos of 2020. “I had a really hard fall through April and May,” she says. "I could feel a voice telling that I wasn’t working enough, and it picked apart every relationship in my life.” Afraid that her new love had been created in the unreal vacuum of lockdown, she didn’t realise that the friendship at its foundation would save it.