Over four tracks, the Icelandic artist masterfully weaves instinctive lyrics around a masterfully restrained music.

‘dinner alone’ is a journey through grief. Across four tracks, it manifests as existential concern, a fear of being forgotten, a fear that no one will care if you go. Grief feeds introspection, remorse, vulnerability, and can also produce lucid candour. Margret gradually unwraps these qualities in the way she sings and the way she constructs each track.

Structurally, ‘dinner alone’ builds itself upwards from opener ‘waiting’. The stripped down ‘waiting’ is followed by the title track, which remains musically restrained but pushes Margret’s voice to a trembling peak. As she sings, “My skin’s burning and I don’t feel like moving on, the rain kept on raining, on and on and on”, accompanied by piano, it paints around her a bowl of sadness.

When the EP reaches ‘i went outside’, it has established itself fully as a despondent, tearful assembly of Margret’s straight-from-the-hip verbalization. ‘i went outside’ has a more fleshed out arrangement and is nonchalantly delivered as if two songs merged into one. A familiarly folksy atmosphere transitions into a gentle shoegaze groove, which carries the song rockily towards its close. It is a crucial interval, clearing the palette for ‘two scars.’

“Two scars on my face,

My mother’s eyes,
I know I don’t talk,
I only hear her cry.”

Margret’s candour comes to the fore as she gives an insight into a hurtful memory. Here, she is capable of relying solely on her voice to convey the hurt. The lyrics are short and blunt, feeling like a careful curation of recollections. That voice gives these fragmented lines a character, guiding us intuitively through words that would otherwise be difficult to decipher.