Members of the Icelandic band Sigur Rós (left to proper: Kjartan Sveinsson, Jón Ϸór Birgisson and Georg Hólm) have launched ÁTTA, their first album in 10 years.

Tim Dunk/Courtesy of the artist

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Tim Dunk/Courtesy of the artist

Members of the Icelandic band Sigur Rós (left to proper: Kjartan Sveinsson, Jón Ϸór Birgisson and Georg Hólm) have launched ÁTTA, their first album in 10 years.

Tim Dunk/Courtesy of the artist

The music scene in Iceland may be very “small-d” democratic. Musicians would possibly rehearse with a symphony in the course of the day and play in a steel band at night time. It is due to this fact not stunning that Iceland’s beloved experimental rock band Sigur Rós is kicking off its summer season tour Friday with a 41-piece orchestra. The live shows are in assist of ÁTTA, the band’s first album in 10 years.

Sigur Rós’ music, with its lush layers of slow-churning grandeur, has usually commanded a symphonic really feel. ÁTTA, the band’s eighth album, manages to be its most majestic and intimate on the similar time. Strings, keyboards and vocals swell to dramatic heights, whereas bittersweet melodies look inward for launch.

ÁTTA took place by probability. Even earlier than the discharge of the earlier Sigur Rós’ album in 2013, band members roughly went their separate methods. Kjartan Sveinsson, the keyboard participant, started writing movie scores and classical items, whereas singer-guitarist Jón Ϸór Birgisson, who goes by Jónsi, continued his solo profession.

“It was sort of like an accident,” Jónsi instructed NPR concerning the reunion. “Kjartan hadn’t been within the band for 10 years and he came around me in LA and we did a recording jam session in my basement.” The 2 buddies, who had been making music collectively for over twenty years, began noodling round and inventive sparks ignited.

Then the pandemic hit and the mission stalled. However later, after one other basement session, and the enter of authentic bass participant Georg Hólm, a brand new album, in all its darkish magnificence, started to crystalize.

ÁTTA unspools like a symphonic music cycle, with frontman Jónsi’s high-flying falsetto usually reaching for operatic ecstasy in songs like “Skel” (Shell), which he calls “the emo music,” and “Ylur” (Heat) the place the singer stays aloft, using the spiraling thermals of strings and electronics. Perfumed in luxurious reverb, ÁTTA‘s dense ambiance of sound makes it troublesome to inform the distinction between acoustic devices and the digital ones, particularly when Jónsi picks up a cello bow to play his electrical guitar.

It is also arduous to decipher the phrases — whether or not they’re in Icelandic, or what the group has generally referred to as Hopelandic, a collection of made-up nonsense syllables. However like opera, the place you may not perceive the native tongue, it is the music — the band’s unerring manner of writing melodies that tug on the coronary heart — and Jónsi’s expressive efficiency that conveys all that is wanted. One other music in Hopelandic is “Klettur” (Cliff), which sports activities a lumbering, concussive beat that abruptly halts to permit the heavens to open in celestial gentle through large keyboard pedal factors and hovering strings.

The music of ATTA would possibly, relying in your temper, come off as both gloomy or wonderful. Jonsi calls the album “Heavy however hopeful” and admits it was written within the shadow of the pandemic and the warfare in Ukraine. But there are rays of pure golden gentle within the darkness.