Acclaimed Singer-Songwriter Agnes Obel Returns after Six Years With New Album - "The Meaning of Flowers"

Agnes Obel - singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and producer - has just announced her latest studio album. A follow-up to the critically lauded "Myopia" in 2020, this latest record is "The Meaning of Flowers." The album's twelve tracks were directly inspired by Obel's experience through pregnancy and childbirth, and how she felt a deeper sense of interconnection with all living things and the natural world. Beyond that, the acclaimed singer-songwriter also takes inspiration from a few diverse sources - the poetry of Enheduanna (an ancient Sumerian priestess credited as the first named author in history) along with the Danish pop scene of the ‘80s and ‘90s, and the philosophy of Hannah Arendt and Emanuele Coccia.

"The Meaning of Flowers" was written, recorded, arranged and produced all by Obel, in her home studio in Berlin, performing on vocals, piano, keys, synth and sample. She invited a few guest musicians on violin, viola, cello, bass, lap steel, harmonium, flute, sax, percussion, and backing vocals. The album releases on September 18, 2026, on Deutsche Grammophon, on digital, CD and on vinyl and the first single "Laymelli" is already available to stream now.

Obel gave birth to her first child after the recording of "Myopia," and in this new record she explores both the intellectual and the emotional sides of becoming a mother - and took advantage of the neuroplasticity of her brain during pregnancy to take her songwriting in new directions.

“I wanted to see if I could get close to the feeling of a new beginning. It shows itself in the experience of interconnectedness and a new expansive feeling of love that will never end. The point when the inner monologue becomes something interactive and expansive – beyond your own life – and opens your mind to a new and richer notion of life.”

“Blood so Red” grew out of Obel’s encounter with the hymns of Enheduanna, who wrote to Inanna, goddess of childbirth, love, sex, song, and war. But Obel doesn’t simply adapt this mythology; she folds it into the disorienting physicality of her own experience of childbirth. The result is a song about the body as both archive and mystery, a place where experiences can precede language and somehow survive it.

“Tangerine,” the album’s lone instrumental, turns that fascination with transformation into pure sound. Saxophone arpeggios, celesta, and piano meet in a strange, buoyant arrangement that feels less composed than discovered: a “bubbly new wondrous friendship” between timbres that shouldn’t necessarily belong together, but somehow do.

The album is dedicated to Obel’s daughter, and that dedication casts everything else in a different light. "The Meaning of Flowers" becomes not simply an album about motherhood, nature, or ancient mythology, but about the destabilizing knowledge that comes with becoming someone’s parent. Her daughter has changed her, raised her, taught her - and, crucially, left her with the sense that the education is nowhere near finished. In Obel’s world, love is another form of metamorphosis: intimate, bodily, ancient, and always still becoming.

AGNES OBEL ONLINE

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