Agnes Obel has discovered a different way of seeing

It’s kind of wild just how much we take for granted on this magical blue marble we call Earth, moving through our lives with blinkers on until suddenly they fall or are wrested away. The world has a funny way of rearranging us in those moments, and all that we relied upon before for context and guardrails is left to feel inadequate and pale. For Danish artist, producer, and composer Agnes Obel, it was the discovery six summers back, amid a global crisis, that her body was building another one inside it, quite by surprise.Pregnancy brought with it a profound rewiring, with immediate effect she says. Having had to shut down her Myopia tour and return home to Berlin, Obel had done what she’d always done before when coming off the road: start another album. Intrigued by tech and how it has remade the world in its image, externalising our nervous systems and inverting our ideas of human nature itself, she’d begun to research songs relating in some way to the machine age. But that all went out the window when the two blue lines appeared, confirming a positive pregnancy test, and Obel’s mind swerved off track and down a whole new rabbit hole.“It was, in very real time, a brain-altering ex...