Sigur Rós - Sigur Ròs - If emotion had a sound

Just as ice meets fire in their homeland, so the music of Sigur Rós is the fruit of a meeting between many different artistic influences, from psychedelia to dream-pop, from shoegaze to post-rock. The resulting sound, filtered through a tormented sensibility and a typically Nordic taste, is something unique and instinctively distinctive. A fragile, always moving kind of music, which won over half the world with the masterpieces "Ágætis Byrjun" and "()", already leaving a decisive mark on the 2000s, before evolving and shifting from album to album: from the extraordinary pop essay balancing joy and melancholy of "Takk..." to the purely ambient turn of "Valtari", right up to the latest, unexpected and thoroughly abrasive "Kveikur". Ahead of their Italian tour (July 23rd in Tarvisio, 26th in Ferrara, 27th in Lucca, 28th in Rome), we reached Georg Holm, the Icelandic band's bassist, by phone, who told us about the genesis of the new album.

First “Valtari”, now “Kveikur”. Two albums in under a year, why is that?

Well, that's not exactly how it went. "Valtari" is an album we worked on for a really long time! The oldest recordings on that record actually date back to 2005, it was sort of a collection of tracks that for a long time we weren't able to finish. This new album, on the other hand, we completed in a relatively short span of time.

Kjartan Sveinsson (the keyboardist, ed.) decided to leave the band a few months ago. For fans it was an unexpected defection. Had something cracked in his relationship with the band?

Absolutely not. I think he did it to keep making music on his own. Five years ago, while we kept writing and working on our music, he was studying composition and eventually graduated. He's always loved cinema and always said he wanted to work on film scores or similar projects. Last year he decided he didn't want to come on tour with us and nobody held it against him because it wasn't a problem for us. Then, when we got back, he told us very clearly that he no longer wanted to be in the band. We were upset, but we respected the honesty with which he did it, rather than staying on without any real motivation.

Does the new album reflect in some way the changes you've been through this past year?

I think the biggest change is the fact that Kjartan is no longer with us. I think that's really changed the dynamics of the band, because now there are only three of us writing instead of four. Still, I'd say that, despite this, the songs on the new record are one hundred percent Sigur Rós songs, just with something different about them.

"Kveikur" seems to be the exact opposite of "Valtari". What pushed you towards such an aggressive shift in sound?

It certainly wasn't a decision, we never wanted to deliberately head in any particular direction, it all happened very naturally. The decisive factor was probably the speed with which we put everything together and rehearsed it, which pumped us up with a lot more adrenaline than usual, raising the energy between us as well. It definitely wasn't a deliberate opposition to the sound of "Valtari". We still think that record has some excellent songs on it. And even less did we want to vent anger or negativity on "Kveikur": quite simply, we felt like we wanted to explode, as I said before there was a lot of energy between us.

Talking about the lyrics, you went back to singing everything in Icelandic. Did you have some particular message to get across?

Well, actually no, it simply suited the sound of the record better. For instance, one of the tracks ("Brenninstein", ed.) is about a volcanic eruption, something that's an everyday occurrence in Iceland. Generally speaking, they're all stories about events or situations that concern us closely, that we've lived through or are still living through. Even with the lyrics we never really said to ourselves "we have to talk about this or that", they just come out almost by chance, very often after the instrumental parts are already finished.

Will you be changing anything about your live approach to reflect the new sound of “Kveikur”?

We'll definitely be playing a lot of songs from the album, since the tour is starting out with the idea of promoting it, but overall we'd like it to be a mix of elements from the present and the past, since we've built up quite a lot of material over the years by now. We're very proud of this new album and that's another reason we want to play a lot of it live, but at the same time we'll certainly be doing plenty of our older songs too, because people still love them. Right now we're playing four songs from “Kveikur” but I'm sure that will soon grow to a lot more.

from OndaRock for Il Fatto – Il Fatto Quotidiano

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google