Valtari, the band’s previous album, was the sound of a band hitting a thematic, intellectual, and musical dead-end. Their music had become something beautiful but safe — auditory wallpaper that functioned as the background for whatever else you happened to be doing at the time. They were trapped in their textures and far too beholden to Jonsi’s vocals. The band’s music since Ágætis byrjun had become ever more commercial too, becoming the sound of advertisements, easy emotional catharsis, and the soundtrack for selling you some easy escapism.
Listening to their back catalog (after their debut album Von) you hear the sound of a band finding a groove that left them nowhere to go. The band seemed to know it too, in the aftermath of Valtari break up rumors circulated and one of the founding members of the band decided to leave, reducing the group to a trio.
Their next album was done and released in a year and is, from the opening, a reminder of the band’s immense capacity for scale. The opening track, Brennisteinn, is by the standards of this group absolutely fucking ferocious, a pummelling drum line and some sinister buzzing guitar making the whole thing just rock. Wisely the band has repositioned Jonsi’s vocals too -- here they are mostly background and sound the best they have since something like () precisely because they are used as another unique instrument. Four minutes in the group introduce a little space into the track with some focus on Jonsi’s singing but here there is a clarity of purpose and sense of contrast that feels earned and gives the song both emotional and musical shape. They’ve not sounded this big since Von and the guitar feedback over strings that sound tremulous is like glimpsing the darkness and ambiguities behind their serene and placid earlier albums.
Hrafntinna starts with delicate chimes but there’s a coldness here that makes me sit up and take notice rather than sink back into the balm. The production of Jonsi’s vocals layers in some interesting ways and when the drums start to hit, the whole thing feels almost geological. It is a thematic reaching back to the more experimental and naturalistic noise of Von that manages to make the emotional high points of the music feel earned. It’s a track made through the drum work again, which combines with the chimes and brass to remind you that this band can do so much more than just lull you into your happy place and can even be exciting to listen to. Ísjaki, which follows, is another excellent piece of work that absolutely takes off in the breakdown as an honest-to-god actual rock song. The album just breathes in a way that previous work couldn’t, there’s a newfound freedom here that doesn’t sacrifice what the band already did extremely well but manages to repurpose it, targeting it towards different ends.
For the first time in a long time, the band seems to have an answer to the question that’s plagued so much of their previous work: where is all this going? On a philosophical level, it's the difference between the sound of optimism and the sound of hope. Just look up, look to the horizon, and use what you have to hand and the difference can be genuinely remarkable. This shift is perfectly clear on Yfirborð which has a vocal that sounds similar to earlier stuff on Takk.. but there are some pulsing drums here, an actual rhythm section putting some blood back into things that make the whole thing feel so much more lively. When the cymbals start crashing three minutes in, it’s another exhilarating build and release which winds into an almost creepy vocal mix right at the end.
The album's title track, Kveikur is Sigur Ros writing a Godspeed composition. It is a shockingly heavy track with some almost metal guitar work. There is something shocking about the band here, in the best way, as what you start to hear is the sound of the New breaking out of their sound. Is this the same band that made Valtari? Could they always have done this? The wonder of the New is in its capacity to overturn our own perceptions of the present and past. You encounter the New and suddenly find yourself thinking: ‘where did this come from?’ Perhaps the point is that we are just not accustomed to looking at things in the right way. After all, this album in particular is less a radical break with what came before and more a shift in perspective, emphasis, and tone. If anything, it makes me go back to their work over the decade or so previously and see if I can find there the latencies and potentialities of the New that find fullest expression in this album.
Maybe they just needed to get away from it all, from the adverts, the adulation, the soundtracks, and the commercial reality of the present -- maybe the New is less in innovation but in recuperating and reconstituting elements of your own history and influences into patterns never tried before. Rafstraumur could easily have been a retreading of previous ground but keeps the energy of the album up with an absolutely joyous breakdown in its final third and it’s the first moment of really high, classic Sigur Ros emotion on the whole record, connecting beautifully after the earlier tracks colder, heavier affect.
Var, the album closer, is by the standards of this record initially quite gently. However, rather than the gooey sentimentalism that one might expect there’s something pensive and haunted at work in the almost hesitant string section. It’s the sound of something winding down, the calm after a storm -- beautiful, yes, but aware of the wreckage that’s been left behind. There is something very hopeful in this album, not just in the intellectual and musical content but in the fact that it exists at all, that it came into being at all. The present in all of its complexity can seem like an aesthetic mausoleum, a space in which thought and art can be bricked up and broken down, turned into commodities to be endlessly replayed and exchanged. Tear it down, blow the thing sky high if you must because music is not just the sound of the present that can be sold back to you. Music can be a weapon too, a joyful noise against the present, pointing toward something New.