Icelandic cellist and composer Eythor Arnalds announces the release of his new single Promenade nr. 7, the latest preview of his forthcoming second full-length album Music for Walking, arriving May 29, 2026 via Alda Music. Following his debut album The Busy Child (2025) and the live EP String Theory (2025), Arnalds continues to develop a distinctive body of work situated at the intersection of neo-classical composition, ambient music, and cinematic sound.
Conceived not as a traditional album but as a companion for movement, Music for Walking explores music as an environment, something to move through rather than simply listen to. Structured as a series of “Promenades,” the project is designed to align with walking, breath, and thought, encouraging focus, reflection, and altered states of awareness. Promenade nr. 7 captures this philosophy with calm restraint and gradual emotional expansion, unfolding through a sense of quiet, building momentum.
Rooted in cello-led neo-classical writing, the track features violin, viola, piano, bass, and subtle percussion, performed by Arnalds alongside members of the Reykjavík Symphony Orchestra. The recording was conducted by Deutsche Grammophon artist Viktor Orri Árnason, known for collaborations with Björk, Ólafur Arnalds, Jóhann Jóhannsson, Yo-Yo Ma, and Hildur Guðnadóttir. Recorded at Reykjavík’s Harpa Concert Hall and produced and mixed by Grammy-nominated producer Bergur Þórisson, the piece sits within a lineage of immersive ambient works such as Brian Eno’s Music for Airports and Max Richter’s Sleep.
With Promenade nr. 7, Arnalds continues his exploration of movement as meditation. Beginning from a minimal two-note theme, the composition slowly gathers energy, the cello rising gradually “like a chain of thought that starts with an open mind and a simple idea,” as Arnalds describes it. The music evolves organically, balancing calm and tension, hope and subtle unease, mirroring the internal shifts that occur during solitary movement.
“Walking helps us to meditate in our mind and open up our thought process and widen our horizon in every meaningful way,” Arnalds explains. Designed to be experienced while walking, ideally through headphones, the Promenades reflect the rhythm of footsteps and the changing landscape of thought itself.
The accompanying video deepens the connection between sound, memory, and place. Shot in southern Iceland by filmmaker Karim Ilya and art director Oliver James Broughton, the film follows Arnalds walking through the landscape surrounding his grandfather’s former cabin near Þingvellir, where the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates slowly drift apart. The stark terrain, both expansive and quietly unsettling, mirrors the emotional atmosphere of the music.
“As a child I spent much time in my grandfather’s wooden cabin by a lake in southern Iceland,” Arnalds recalls. “There was no electricity, no running water, no phones. The environment itself became the focus, wind, water, birds. That sense of calm and awareness stayed with me.”
Water emerges as a central motif throughout the piece and its visual world. “We are walking water,” Arnalds reflects, pointing to both the physical and symbolic relationship between the human body and the landscape. The cello, carried through the terrain, becomes a parallel to human presence itself, an instrument shaped by breath, weight, and movement.
With Music for Walking, Eythor Arnalds continues to establish himself as a composer creating music for presence and immersion. Promenade nr. 7 embodies the album’s central idea: being alone with music and nature, moving forward step by step, sometimes calm, sometimes eerie, always in motion.
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