Missing from the valuable end-of-year lists I digest with interest is the category of best collaboration in music. Were there such a category, my enthusiastic nominee would be Ólafur Arnalds’ A Dawning (2025). Arnalds is a genre-busting composer of ambient, soundtrack, and song music, and A Dawning is his collaboration with the late Irish singer-songwriter Eoin French, who records as Talos. Indeed, this luminous creation is both a meditation on the very nature of musical collaboration and a fitting legacy for an artist who was tragically lost early in his promising musical journey.
Talos’ music is essentially Irish folk, with poetic, emotion-laden lyrics set to almost entirely electronic instrumentation. Before his death in August 2024, Talos divided his time between Ireland and Iceland, and along with his three previous full-length recordings on BMG Records, he recorded Sun Divider, an EP with another son of Iceland, Atli Örvarsson.
For the versatile Arnalds, collaboration could be his middle name. His prolific recordings are matched by his eclectic range of styles and, significantly, the range of artists he works with. Indeed, each of the seven cuts on his Island Songs (2016) is a collaboration with different artists, including the beautiful ballad “Particles” with Nanna Bryndís from Icelandic shoegazers Of Monsters and Men.
In A Dawning, Arnalds has found yet another kindred spirit in Talos, and his characteristic piano, string, and electronic arrangements perfectly support Talos’ folk-song aesthetic. Placed at the beginning, “Shared Time”, a scratchy spoken word recording of Talos explaining music, lays out a sort of manifesto for the music to come: “I mean, that’s what music is, you know / There’s an easefulness to it / And like a communal end to, to like / Solitary kind of creation or something like that / But you know, there’s, like, the organist playing in the church / The shaman plays the drums / Like, it can really / Yeah / It’s more connected or something / The burden of, like, actually performing / Is shared as opposed to just focused on you.”
The connection continues with “Signs”, which highlights how Arnalds’ rhythmic style combines with Talos’ lyrical singing. Unlike the strict digital rhythms of much electronic music, he generates pulses, adding subtle poly-rhythms as the backbeat becomes more strident. Talos matches this, singing with ethereal wistfulness that becomes more insistent as he asks: “Why did I ask it? / Why did I speak up? / Awake in the worn night / I break into pieces.”
As he uses varying pulses and rhythms to humanize the quantification of electronic music, Arnalds colours these songs with analog piano and strings. Talos sings in a high tenor, comfortably inhabiting his head voice, frequently and effortlessly venturing into falsetto, creating an ancient sound that contrasts with the modernist goings-on.
Halfway in, “Borrowed Time” includes another recitation, this time by the British folk singer Alexi Murdoch, which provides a poetic second subject: how everything we are is built on legacies from the past. “Often, I have felt the heat / Of wings that beat inside my chest / The flightless weight of countless nights / Nights that came before my time / Condensed.”
The record’s title track, an eerie personal elegy, provides the emotional climax. Arranged with arpeggiated piano and harmonizing strings, Talos begins with his pure high tone, building to full voice: “You curled up gods while I pondered death / It feels like this war is our dawning / Don’t let that light outrun us yet / It feels like this war is our dawning.”
Talos died before the project was complete, and Arnalds finished it himself. A Dawning closes with “We Didn’t Know We Were Ready” with Talos singing to a spare piano. The lyrics settle on a coda: “What if the silence said it? / We didn’t know we were ready,” which is joined by the voices of a chorus comprising co-writers Niamh Regan and Ye Vagabonds (Diarmuid and Brían MacGloinn).
Sonically breathtaking, lyrically profound, and strikingly sad, A Dawning is a monument to the art of collaboration, maybe the best collaboration of 2025, and certainly the most impactful recording that I listened to that year. It is a fitting memorial to Eoin French, who took his professional name from the animated bronze statue that protected Crete.