''Citizen of Glass'' is the third studio album by Danish singer-songwriter

Agnes Obel Agnes Caroline Thaarup Obel (born 28 October 1980) is a Danish singer, songwriter, and musician based in Berlin. Her debut album, ''Philharmonics (album), Philharmonics'' (2010), was released by PIAS Recordings, and was certified gold in June ...

, released on 21 October 2016 by

PIAS Recordings PIAS Recordings (formerly Play It Again Sam) is a Belgian record label founded in 1982 by Kenny Gates and Michel Lambot, In September 2024, the company was acquired by Universal Music Group. Play It Again Sam expanded along with other European i ...

. Four tracks were selected as singles: "Familiar", "Golden Green", "It's Happening Again", and "Stretch Your Eyes". Obel launched a European tour at the end of October 2016, followed by a North American tour in February 2017.

Background

On this album, Obel evokes the German concept of ''Gläserner Bürger'', the "citizen of glass", as the guiding thread of the album, a citizen whose body and life are known to everyone. She discovered this term during her previous tour, while reading the news about the Edward Snowden case and citizen surveillance. Questions of transparency and privacy are themes that inspired her, forcing her to think about what she reveals of herself in her music. She worked on the concept of "glass" to create new songs, particularly by adding new instruments to her repertoire such as the

trautonium The Trautonium is an electronic synthesizer invented in 1930 by Friedrich Trautwein in Berlin at the Musikhochschule's music and radio lab, the Rundfunkversuchstelle. Soon afterward Oskar Sala joined him, continuing development until Sala's de ...

, a rare instrument from the late 1920s whose crystalline sounds are reminiscent of glass.

Reception

''Citizen of Glass'' received universal acclaim from

music critics Music journalism (or music criticism) is media criticism and reporting about music topics, including popular music, classical music, and traditional music. Journalists began writing about music in the eighteenth century, providing commentary on ...

. At

Metacritic Metacritic is an American website that aggregates reviews of films, television shows, music albums, video games, and formerly books. For each product, the scores from each review are averaged (a weighted average). Metacritic was created ...

, which assigns a

normalized Normalization or normalisation refers to a process that makes something more normal or regular. Science * Normalization process theory, a sociological theory of the implementation of new technologies or innovations * Normalization model, used in ...

rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the album received an

average In colloquial, ordinary language, an average is a single number or value that best represents a set of data. The type of average taken as most typically representative of a list of numbers is the arithmetic mean the sum of the numbers divided by ...

score of 82, citing "universal acclaim", based on 11 reviews. John Murphy from ''

musicOMH ''MusicOMH'' (stylized as ''musicOMH'') is a London-based online music magazine which publishes independent reviews, features and interviews from across all genres including classical, metal, rock and R&B. History ''MusicOMH'' was founded an ...

'' wrote "Some earlier fans of Obel may miss the more minimal sound of her early albums, and there’s certainly no big crossover track that will propel Obel to the mainstream. This is a haunting listen though, and one that will provide suitable company as the long winter nights start to draw in." James Christopher Monger at

AllMusic AllMusic (previously known as All-Music Guide and AMG) is an American online database, online music database. It catalogs more than three million album entries and 30 million tracks, as well as information on Musical artist, musicians and Mus ...

wrote "Where her relatively austere prior outings relied largely on piano and strings, Citizen of Glass revels in ghostly electronics and voice modulation, even going so far as to bring in a temperamental, late-'20s monophonic synthesizer called a Trautonium. The string arrangements are more ambitious and the composition style is a bit more opaque, but the ten-track set is unequivocally Obel-esque."

Track listing

Charts

Weekly charts

Year-end charts

Certifications

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Citizen of Glass 2016 albums Agnes Obel albums PIAS Recordings albums