Singer-songwriter Jenny Lindfors started out performing in the venues of Dublin in the early 2000s before moving to London in the mid 2010s.
There, Lindfors did some songwriting for other artists and started the Sailing Stones project, before moving to Bristol where she’s now based and releasing 2020’s album Polymnia.
Today we are premiering the video for ‘The Colour of the Sun’ the second single from her forthcoming second album Slow Magic, out July 3rd 2026.
Lindfors wrote the song around a specific moment – her toddler daughter hearing Karen Carpenter’s voice on the radio for the first time. “I just saw her face, and she was so overwhelmed by the beauty of it, she hugged me so tightly.”
The song holds two things at once: that particular joy, and flowers seen on a roadside the same day. “I thought – that is somebody’s child. It’s a song about my maternal anxiety, about how terrible things can happen alongside the magical things, too.”
I hear shades of Gwenno and Aldous Harding in the song’s warm tones.
Watch the video filmed by Julian Ward.
Slow Magic as a whole takes the experience of matrescence – the physical, psychological and emotional shift that comes with becoming a mother – as its subject, though Lindfors gets at it sideways, through vignettes and sensation rather than declaration. She’s spoken about wanting a record that spoke to her experience the way Joni Mitchell’s Blue spoke to female vulnerability around heartbreak – not to replicate it, but to find her own equivalent register.
“I remember telling my partner, I really want to write about this, but I’m too knackered, too sleep deprived.” Lindfords says. “I didn’t know who I was anymore. But I wanted there to be a record that spoke to my joy and my pain and my thin-skinnedness likeJoni Mitchell’s Blue spoke to female vulnerability around heartbreak. Not that I could write another Blue, but I knew I had to navigate the idea of writing about motherhood, especially as there’s a lot of shame tied around it.”
Slow Magic draws on Bobbie Gentry’s country warmth, Scott Walker’s dramatic reach and Linda Perhacs’ uncanny folk. Hazy woodwind, warm guitars and electronics fed through malfunctioning tape machines.
Slow Magic is out July 3rd 2026.
Sailing Stones
Niall Byrne is the founder of the most-influential Irish music site Nialler9, where he has been writing about music since 2005. He is the co-host of the Nialler9 Podcast and has written for the Irish Times, Irish Independent, Sunday Times, Totally Dublin, Cara Magazine, Red Bull and more. Niall is a DJ, co-founder of Lumo Club, event curator, Indie Sleaze club promoter, and producer of gigs and monthly listening parties & events in Dublin.
