A young musician once dreamed of an orchestra. Now she’s given that dream to her younger self. Revered today for her multi-award-winning scores for film and TV, including Chernobyl, Joker and Tár, Hildur Guðnadóttir released her debut album ‘Mount A’ in September 2006. 20 years on, the Icelandic composer is celebrating the anniversary by reimagining some of her earliest music.
Her new Deutsche Grammophon album ‘This Will Be Us’ gathers orchestral versions of eight tracks that first appeared on ‘Mount A,’ ‘Without Sinking’ and ‘Saman,’ alongside two newly written pieces. Guðnadóttir plays solo cello, performing with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin under conductor Robert Ames. She also produced the album, which was recorded, mixed and mastered by her long-time collaborator Francesco Donadello.
‘This Will Be Us’ arrives October 23, 2026, with liner notes by Guðnadóttir and filmmaker Sarah Polley. She performs at a special launch event at the Berlin Philharmonie on October 25, and to mark the anniversary, DG reissues the three earlier albums as LPs on July 3, a first vinyl release for ‘Mount A.’
Guðnadóttir grew up making music with others, in choirs, bands and orchestras. “That world meant everything to me,” she recalls. “But I felt I needed some space to hear my own thoughts.” She recorded ‘Mount A’ alone with her cello, and her friend Skúli Sverrisson had to persuade her to share the work with the outside world. The album came out under the pseudonym “Lost in Hildurness,” a nickname friends gave her because she was so often lost in her own world.
Sverrisson, fellow composer Jóhann Jóhannsson and her father Guðni Franzson joined her on later albums. “Even though the music on these records is deeply personal,” she says, “my closest friends and family have always been essential to my having the courage to keep playing and to share the music at all.”
That courage carried her to the front rank of contemporary composers. Her accolades include two Grammy Awards for Chernobyl and Joker, an Academy Award for Joker, an Emmy for Chernobyl and a Golden Globe for Joker. She has since written acclaimed scores for Tár, Women Talking, A Haunting in Venice, Hedda, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple and The Bride, while her choral and orchestral work The Fact of the Matter premiered at the 2022 BBC Proms.
The 20th anniversary of ‘Mount A’ offered a moment to take stock. “Seeing that number on the horizon felt like a good moment to pause,” she says. “When I was trying to be a one-person string orchestra, I always dreamed of having more people playing with me. I decided to give that young person the anniversary gift of hearing her music played by an orchestra.”
The reinvented tracks glow with new depth and space, music that breathes differently with a full orchestra behind it. As Sarah Polley writes in her album notes, longtime fans will recognize many of these pieces, but here they take on new life, an expansive scope, and a sense of fellowship with others, the work of someone who listens long enough to hear.
Tracklist:
“In Gray”
“Ascent”
“Erupting Light”
“Opaque”
“Overcast”
“Unveiled”
“Bær”
“Birting”
“Blind Sarabande”
“The Song That Never Was”