Jóhann Jóhannsson - Orphée

Released in 2016, Orphée was Jóhann Jóhannsson's first album for Deutsche Grammophon, arriving after more than a decade of soundtrack work including his Oscar-nominated score for The Theory of Everything. Recorded across studios in Copenhagen, Reykjavík and Berlin over several years, it marked a return to writing purely for himself rather than in service of someone else's images — built loosely around the myth of Orpheus, a story about descent, loss and the difficulty of return. It sits at the head of a wave of composers, many working out of Berlin in the 2010s, who brought a film composer's patience and restraint into standalone contemporary classical records. Jóhannsson died in 2018, making Orphée one of a small handful of studio albums he completed under his own name — a genuinely important record in the genre.

Jóhann Jóhannsson was an Icelandic composer who came up through Reykjavík's experimental and post-rock scenes before moving into orchestral and electronic composition, then into film. He scored The Theory of Everything, Sicario and Arrival, earning an Oscar nomination and a reputation as one of the most distinctive film composers of his generation — patient, textural, unafraid of silence. Away from film work he kept releasing albums under his own name, moving between minimalism, drone and orchestral writing, always more interested in atmosphere than melody for its own sake. He died suddenly in Berlin in February 2018, aged 48, leaving Orphée as one of his final major studio statements and a clear sense of where his music might have gone next.