Sofia Härdig Illuminates the Shadows with Lighthouse of Glass Desert Island Cloud
Swedish sonic alchemist Sofia Härdig returns with Lighthouse of Glass — her ninth studio album, out now via Icons Creating Evil Art and Bark At Your Owner. Following a steady stream of arresting singles, Härdig opens the floodgates on what may be her most ambitious and intimately crafted record to date.
More than an album, Lighthouse of Glass is an excavation. Born from two years of self-imposed artistic solitude, Härdig wrote and recorded over a hundred songs in near monastic isolation. “I was in this cave of writing,” she recalls — a cave lined not with echoes, but with fragments of untold stories taped to the walls. Each of the ten final tracks stands as a shard of that creative crystal — meticulously carved, fiercely luminous.
From the haunted hush of “Pale Fire” to the elegiac swell of “Kingdom Come,” Härdig’s voice is both weapon and balm, searing through her lush, hand-stitched production with unwavering intensity. The title track, improvised in a single take and left untouched, feels like pure transmission — a moment of rare, divine possession that sparked her collaboration with multi-instrumentalist Bebe Risenfors (Tom Waits, Elvis Costello). His sonic fingerprints, along with those of Swedish heavyweights like Robert Johnsson and John Essing, leave no doubt: this is a record built on chemistry, craft, and quiet rebellion.
Härdig’s process was elemental. Recording at home and during a residency at the Visby Center for Composers, she stitched together soundscapes using trombone, violin, and the occasional tin roof. Influences flicker like ghosts — Nick Cave’s gravitas, PJ Harvey’s raw nerve, Alan Vega’s fractured poetry — but the result is unmistakably Härdig: darkly cinematic, genre-agnostic, and pulsing with life beneath the surface.
An artist who once composed with vacuum cleaners and sang to boat motors, Härdig remains defiantly singular. Lighthouse of Glass is her signal fire — a shimmering beacon for anyone who’s ever searched for beauty in the static, or found a song in the silence.
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