Mounted high on the wall in Elín Hall’s Reykjavík kitchen is a pair of white horns, picked up from a Red Cross thrift store in the city. They’re a nod to her grandfather, who once shot a reindeer by accident while on a hunting trip with his lawyer colleagues; they made him turn it into a piece of art, haunting him in his home. Hall pretends it’s the same pair even though her grandmother threw them away years ago.
The 20-something Icelandic actress and musician enjoys incorporating some macabre items into the apartment she shares with her partner, their style a mix of modern and vintage. She points out a skull, taken from a production of Hamlet she was in while in school, wedged into a bookcase. Antique green velvet and real wood floors. A candelabrum of three lit candles on the large wood dining table, sandalwood incense smoking quietly.
Hall gives the impression that she is someone who has crafted her life purposely. She sits in her apartment in early September, drinking coffee in a black textured sweater set, with embellished jewelry and mismatched earrings, reflecting on what it means to aspire to a certain level of success. Her first two albums, heyrist í mér? (“Can you hear me?”) and Með öðrum orðum (“In other words”), earned her critical acclaim and awards in Iceland and festival performances around Europe. Simultaneously, she’s built an acting career that has made her well-known in the country; Hall recently played a young version of Iceland’s first woman president, Vigdís Finnbogadóttir, in a The Crown-esque mini-series, and her 2024 film When the Light Breaks premiered at Cannes.
Now, she’s working with Swedish producer Martin Terefe at a studio in London and releasing her alt-pop music in English for the first time. She’s also gearing up for the country’s annual music festival, Iceland Airwaves, which she’ll play for the third year in a row this November.
There’s a sense that she could take this career anywhere she might want.
“In my head, it's very two different things, making music in Iceland and then making music internationally, and it kind of messes with your head sometimes,” Hall muses. “I had this unique decision to make to stay in my own cultural context or leave it. And when I decided to leave it, because I decided to work with an international team, there have been so many things that have snuck back on me, these questions of how ambitious am I, and do I want fame, or things that just were never a part of, I think, how I saw myself as an artist. I'm just in awe, still, that I'm able to be a musician. My biggest fear isn't not making it. It's to lose the things that I already have.”
Hall grew up a middle child, with two sisters, about 10 minutes away from her current place in Reykjavík’s city center. She describes it as “boring” — in large part because her parents wanted her to stay inside; they’re Icelandic, but they had lived for years in New Jersey and Montreal, where kids couldn’t necessarily always roam where they wanted. “Iceland is a very safe country, but my parents weren't really used to giving their kids that same freedom,” she says. “I sometimes felt really trapped inside, but that was actually cool, because I learned how to operate GarageBand and iMovie and create things inside my room.”
Those creations ended up on big stages even when Hall was just starting out. At 15 or 16, she performed with her guitar at Iceland’s Eurovision qualification competition, placing third. That appearance was seen by a director who hired her for her first professional acting gig, in the TV series Case.
She describes herself as an “ambitious” child. Hall wanted to be everything: a hairstylist, a doctor, a filmmaker, a musician, a dancer, a weather news person. She never really grew out of that desire. “I grew up, and I'm still trying to do three different careers at the same time,” she says with a smile.
Music was everywhere as a kid, woven into the schools she attended and the community of musicians and artists in Iceland. The country has become known for punching above its weight in terms of musicians who achieve international success across genres — Björk, Sigur Rós, Of Monsters and Men, GusGus, and most recently Laufey, to name a few. Iceland Airwaves has been held since 1999, featuring a combination of on- and off-venue shows that completely take over the city, bringing performers into museums, churches, bars, and even volcanic caves.
“We really, I think, are open to people experimenting and just listening to what other people are creating. It's a very open atmosphere, and there are lots of opportunities for new emerging artists,” Hall says. “Icelandic people are just a very music-loving country, which also just creates a lot of good energy around it. It trickles down to the music schools, and even just our normal schools. My elementary school wasn't specifically artsy or anything, but there was still a lot of encouragement from teachers to experiment.”
During my visit to Reykjavík to experience the city’s music scene with Iceland Music, I witnessed some of that energy firsthand. The Laufey songs trickling through the speakers on my Icelandair flight, the Sigur Rós music permeating the family’s perfumerie Fischersund as we closed our eyes and smelled the kerfill of founder Jónsi’s childhood summers, the sweaty dancing during Inspector Spacetime’s gig at the bar Prikið and Björk’s DJ set at record shop Smekkleysa, the deteriorating piano saved after the storm that flooded local label and artistic space Marvaða. Even our visits to non-music spaces, like the Sky Lagoon spa and sauna, where we looked out over the ocean, or the pizza place BakaBaka, felt imbued with some sort of collective energy.
Iceland Airwaves, which runs from November 6-8, brings together the local community. Hall used to sneak into shows as a teenager, and she performed adjacent Airwaves sets — at venues not directly tied to the festival — for seven or eight years before the festival officially added her to its lineup. Two years ago, she opened the festival at the Fríkirkjan church. Last year, she played at Art Museum, one of the festival’s biggest stages. This year, she’ll close the festival on Saturday in a full-circle moment.
“I love how it just completely changes this part of the city. There's music everywhere, people everywhere, and you can just kind of go from the church to the concert hall and there's gigs,” Hall says. “You can go from seeing Aurora to seeing Eva, to seeing Monsters and Men. There are so many artists that I have read about and then discovered that they played Airwaves right before they blew up.”
Will Elín Hall blow up even more than she has already? Next March, she’ll open for Laufey at Kórinn in Reykjavík's suburb of Kópavogur. But she’s not sure where this will all go, only that she wants to keep making music and telling stories on screen and on stage. Fame in and of itself is less of a concern.
“I do not aspire to be too famous at all,” Hall says. “I'm famous enough in Iceland, and it's just, I know the pros and cons of that, so I kind of like being able to go to London and nobody knows who I am. That's really cool to me.” (On my trip home, I’ll see her bright blue eyes and red hair magnified on a giant Blue Lagoon advertisement at the airport.)
Her pivot to singing in English, most recently on songs like “Wolf Boy” and “Heaven to a Heathen,” isn’t necessarily because she wants more international success. However, she grew tired of having to over-explain the meanings behind her songs to non-Icelandic audiences. Still, both languages come with their freedoms and restrictions.
“It's very fun to write in Icelandic because there are a lot of things that haven't been said, and I feel like there aren't a lot of people writing from the perspective of my generation,” she says. “But English is just different because it's a way more forgiving language. There are so many wrong ways to say things in Icelandic. You just speak more generally in English, which sometimes can be more fun to write poetry that way, [because] it has more meanings. English can sometimes be a bit more ambiguous, but in Icelandic, for that same sentence, there are five ways to say it, and they all mean different things, and you have to choose.”
She thinks maybe she’d move abroad one day, but it feels far away at this moment. She has her community here. The tiny underground music venue next door, her studio downstairs, the National Theater and Concert Hall just a few minutes away, her friends close by and coming over for dinner parties at the big wooden table. We look out her large picture window onto the city, rain drizzling down the pane. “I just really think,” Hall says, “this is the most beautiful part of Reykjavík.”
