New Music Friday #8: I've missed Sigur Rós

a little love letter to them

Album cover, ÁTTA - Sigur Rós, artist - Rúrí

Me and Jack finally got in the studio with Ailsa again:

A lyric of hers has stayed with me:

“I just wanted to try and enjoy existing”

I made my first absolute TikTok HIT about one of Jack’s production techniques; piano resonance, not reverb (as one commenter corrected me):

@catrinvincent#studiotips #production #musicproduction #guitar #musicstudio #musicstudiotk #musicstudiolife

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The band filmed something special…

I also managed to submit a short story to a magazine! It wasn’t very good, but it felt good to write.

My story

Musicians often write, draw, photograph, film and act as well. Creativity isn’t really containable or definable, it’s all the same thing. Sometimes I’ve wondered if I’m more of a writer than a musician (although I’m definitely more practiced at music).

found on Sufjan Steven’s website, “that one time I tried to get published in the New Yorker”

It turns out that living for other people’s approval and attempting to measure art objectively was a really bad idea, so instead of the question;

“what is good?”

I’ve started focussing on this question instead;

“what feels good?”

Now for the difficult stuff.

Lately, nothing does.

I am going through a real ‘dark night of the soul’. This is the internet, so I won’t bare it, but I want to talk about what I miss, so I remember what I need to find again.

I miss thinking, however wrongly, that the grass was all the same shade of green. I miss believing in myself, or naively thinking that things in the world would get fixed.

I miss feeling well. I miss talking about life with excitement. I miss autonomy.

I miss journaling. I miss doing ‘The Artist’s Way’ and starting to believe Julia’s words. I miss meeting new people.

I miss sleeping. I really worked hard to stop my insomnia, and now I’m right back to square one. 

And today, I realised I have really missed Sigur Rós. 

ÁTTA is the band’s first release in a decade.

Released as a ‘surprise drop’, not much is actually known about this album. They’re being cagey about meanings in interviews (which is fair enough). The title is Icelandic for ‘Eight’. The artwork, a rainbow on fire, was made by Icelandic artist Rúrí.

Does it allude to the environment, human rights or childhood? All three?

Sigur Rós began the year I was born, 1994. The name means, ‘Victory Rose’, given to Jónsi’s younger sister born just a few days before the band formed. They signed to the Icelandic ‘Bad Taste’ because the label thought Jónsi’s falsetto would appeal to teenage girls. Thirteen years later, I’d fall asleep to Untitled Three on repeat every night.

It’s 2023 now. In the wake of assault allegations against a (now exiled) drum member and tax fraud investigations, Sigur Rós told the Guardian that the period this new album emerged from was ‘depressing and heavy and intense’. Journalist Dorian Lynskey wrote,

‘a band whose music inspired breathless celestial metaphors seemed to fall to earth with an ugly thud’.

In the same article, Jónsi decries the treatment of the LGBTQ community, and says, “we try to stay out of politics, just to make the music as neutral as possible, but we were talking about the state of the world we live in now: climate change and doom-scrolling.”

“You see all the psychopaths spending crazy amounts of money going to space when they could be saving our planet we are actually living on at the moment. It’s so unbelievably ridiculous!”

I discovered Sigur Rós after watching ‘Planet Earth’ and falling in love with Hoppipolla, its opening credit tune. Jónsi writes all the lyrics in ‘Hopelandic’, a hybrid of his own made up language and Icelandic. As a native English speaker, it’s only just occurred to me how simultaneously freeing and trapping this must feel.

In a way, Jónsi can always say exactly what he wants to, free from scrutiny, but most of the world won’t understand it. It makes me wonder about the artist’s paradox of wanting everyone to know what you’re saying, and no one to.

Hopelandic could have been created as a protest against the world’s dominant language, a funny play on how English dominates music or as an introvert’s only way to communicate. Or it might mean nothing at all. Perhaps it was just a fun idea at the time. As the audience, we’ll never know.

What I don’t understand in words is communicated through the music. This new album is more classical than previous iterations of Sigur Rós. Jónsi’s voice soars in tandem with sweeping orchestras, both swimming in pools of reverb with little other instrumentation. Some drums, here and there, carefully placed. They’re going on tour soon with an entire orchestra.

I want to enjoy listening to this album a little more without plastering my unnecessary thoughts all over it, so I’ll leave you all with an image of thirteen year old me, incredibly anxious, definitely an undiagnosed insomniac, listening to Untitled 3 to fall asleep every night. As I drifted away, I’d imagine a better future, something that looked like being in a studio with a piano, like them. It came true.

Thank you Sigur Rós.