The new single ‘Ocean’ arrives with a compositional logic that says a great deal about Sofi Paez’s Bodies of Water, the Berlin-based Costa Rican pianist’s second album, due 25 September 2026 via OPIA Community. Where a lesser record might deploy water as decorative imagery, Paez builds an entire emotional architecture around it, using each body of water as a distinct entry point into experiences of grief, resilience and renewal.
From Hemingway to the String Section
‘Ocean’, the latest single, began while Paez was reading Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, the scale and unpredictability of that novel’s central image shaping the composition from the start. The track opens with a solitary piano bassline, strings entering incrementally until the piece reaches what Paez describes as a hopeful climax. She has also connected the piece to a period of personal anger and frustration, feelings she redirected toward perseverance rather than resignation.
The moment the string arrangements were realised with live players clearly crystallised something for her. ‘When I first heard the string arrangements played by real people it brought tears to my eyes,’ she said. ‘Nothing can compare to that feeling of hearing the music come alive in the room.’ That reaction is audible in the recording: the strings carry the kind of warmth that only comes from musicians breathing together in a shared space, and it sits in productive tension with the album’s ambient and electronic textures elsewhere.
‘Ocean’ is the third preview of the album, following ‘Waterfall’ and ‘Pond’, the latter made in collaboration with Lara Somogyi. Taken together, the three tracks establish the album’s method: each piece approaches water differently, leaving its emotional resonance open rather than directing the listener toward a fixed conclusion. It is an approach that invites the kind of repeated listening that reveals new things each time.
What Sofi Paez’s Bodies of Water Promises
According to The Line of Best Fit, the full tracklist for Sofi Paez’s Bodies of Water runs as follows: ‘Under’, ‘A Cove’, ‘Waterfall’, ‘Ocean’, ‘Oasis’, ‘Water’, ‘Pond (with Lara Somogyi)’, ‘River’, ‘Spring’, and ‘Lake’. The sequencing alone suggests a journey from depth and enclosure outward toward movement and renewal, and the titles read almost like a field guide to contained and open water in equal measure. Beyond Somogyi, the album features collaborations with Miguel Murrieta Vásquez and Evan Gildersleeve.
Written between Iceland and Berlin, the album’s production combines flowing piano motifs and expressive string arrangements with ambient textures, voice and restrained electronic elements. Pieces develop gradually, resisting resolution in the manner of the best minimalist work. Think of the slower, more spacious passages on ECM releases from the 1970s and 1980s, or the measured unfolding of Arvo Pärt’s tintinnabuli style, though Paez’s language is very much her own, shaped by her classical training and her evident interest in emotional process as compositional structure.
Paez’s debut, Silent Stories, was released through OPIA Community in 2024. In December of that year she took part in OPIA’s Conversations programme at Berlin’s silent green Kulturquartier, and on 14 January 2025 she returned to Jazz Café Escazú in Costa Rica to present the debut in her home country. Later that year, she released the three-track Reykjavík Sessions (Live) with Davidsson, capturing ‘Ripples’, ‘On Thin Air’ and ‘Amsterdam’.
The Reykjavík sessions matter as context here. Iceland’s landscape, with its volcanic geology and proximity to open water, clearly left a mark on the writing of Bodies of Water, which was composed partly there. The isolation and severity of that environment seems to have given Paez’s already considered compositional approach an additional stillness, a willingness to let silence do as much work as sound.
Bodies of Water is due on 25 September 2026 via OPIA Community, with ‘Ocean’ available to hear now.
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