There is something about this album that is a little surprising — after all, the previous album had felt like a natural stopping point — an artistic project reaching its tonal, thematic, and philosophical completion, and in many ways, the music sounded increasingly anachronistic. How can the full-on emotionalism of Sigur Ros even work in this modern world? There is so little that has changed about their sound over the years, and in many ways, fidelity to what they are, and what they do has left the band sounding a little out of time. Yet, as this album starts, I wonder to myself if I haven't been too harsh -- the absolute rush of hearing something so familiar and yet so distant creates this kind of hauntological echo that cannot help but reach out and grab the listener by the throat. Kjartan Sveinsson has returned as the keyboardist and the opening track to this album, “Glóð”, is so painfully familiar that a listener finds themself jolted through time, back to the first moment you heard something from Takk… for the very first time. There are the strings, and Jonsi’s as-ever-ethereal vocals, but the mixing is odd, with the Hopelandic noise being slightly choppy and textural in a way that their earlier work often neglected. The opening track is shockingly short by their standards too, coming in at just under four minutes.
Do you remember? Do you remember what this life used to sound like?
In an era of climate catastrophe, this band runs the risk of a saccharine lack of seriousness, but my God, what a shock to the system “Blóðberg” is -- the naturalism of the band’s compositions, and the ways in which Sigur Ros have always been such a geological sound have been retooled here for the era of the capitalocene. The track is named for a species of thyme native to Iceland but it translates as the far more metal-sounding “blood stone.” In a sense this is deeply traditional Sigur Ros -- but the sound is one of the most desolate arrangements that the band has ever released. Jonsi all but howls as the string section pulses and keens in the background. The video that accompanies the song is made up of these long tracking drone shots of desolate landscapes, where at the base of trees in the desert you might see what could be bodies, entwined into piles -- all you can hear is the sound of the wind over sun-bleached bone and the requiem of s string section. It is the sound of the disaster of man-made climate change, and there is something so fitting and perfect about the band working with Johan Renck, a director best known for his work on the Chernobyl miniseries.
Listen to this on youtube and you won't find what you will hear on so many of the band’s other songs -- no one comments that this is what they want to hear when looking up at the stars at night. It is the closest the band has come to a kind of sonic negativity -- an elegy of sorts, or the score to a world that is -- inevitably -- ending.
Sit with this track for a while, and watch the video that goes with it, and then go and read Andreas Malm’s polemic, How To Blow Up A Pipeline -- private property will cost us the Earth, as Malm puts it, and her the band prove themselves equal to the challenge of writing us all an elegy for that simple, an incontrovertible truth. The album art shows a rainbow on fire, that carries with it the visual echo of burning oil fields -- do you know how much you have lost, how much of the world has simply bloomed and sweated and died without you ever even seeing it? Look at the world and see the oil companies and energy companies which report record profits -- your own phenomenological experience of the world has been stolen from you and this is what that sounds like.
“Skel” or, in English, “Divide”, builds on and iterates what the preceding track had developed with its melancholic string section that weaves Jonsi’s vocals into the mix as additional texture before the record moves on to the pulsing rhythm of “Klettur”. The entire record prominently features the London Symphony Orchestra but it’s the moments at which the music admits the rhythm section (here and on the later track “Gold” is the standout examples) that you hear a band struggle in the friction of a rock band trying to be something greater than just that -- what could this group be if they allowed themselves to be something other than SIGUR ROS?
“Andrá”, the only other track on the record to get a video, is a fascinating piece of media. It opens with a series of candid shots of people sitting in a studio, talking about how long they’ve listened to Sigur Ros: “over ten years” “since I was in college” “about twenty-five years” -- even if you’ve just listened alongside reading these reflections on the band, you’ve been through a similar temporal experience. One of the stories, I found deeply emotionally impactful -- it’s the story of a man who was hit by a car and suffered a traumatic brain injury, and ended up in intense physical therapy. Every Friday the therapist would let patients play the music they wanted and this person listened to Sigur Ros as they (re)learned how to walk. Other stories discuss their children and Sigur Ros being the first song that played as new life came into the world, or the cost and grief of familial suicide and abuse and pain and the ways in which for so many people this band’s music has been cathartic.
I have been so critical of what the band does -- and I think, rightly so, but watching the video was a reminder of the space this band provides -- wherein you can allow yourself to feel something that we keep blocked off or removed from ourselves in day-to-day life. The people in the video were the first to hear the song -- a meditative track that doesn’t start till almost five minutes into the video. It layers beautifully, with a soaring vocal line there in the mix, and whilst you could cynically see this as an exercise in marketing, the overwhelming sense of the track is of a deep-seated and genuine sincerity. Utopian thought is no mere intellectual exercise — the stakes are so high and all of us have lost and endured so much. Our own struggles are so personal and raw and tough to bear, but the very fact of the struggle — of our shared finitude and contingency is a powerful corrective to capitalist individuality. Socialism or barbarism is the choice, as Rosa Luxemburg reminded us, and for all the denigrations of a better world, of the idea that the world can be made anew, the sense of Andrá (and maybe the album as a whole) is that no matter how bleak the world might be, the choice is still there. If you can watch the video for Andrá and not find a tear in your eye you are a far colder soul than I — watch, listen. Cry if you need to. The world can be so dark and so bleak and for all the familiarity, for all the unabashed emotionalism, here is the sound of hope in a hopeless age.