While their music remained uncompromising, the external pressures and strains mounted. What happened next is a familiar story: young band makes music for pleasure, then reluctantly becomes a travelling business. The original lineup of Sigur Rós in Iceland, 2009 … (from left) Kjartan Sveinsson, Jón Pór Birgisson, Orri Páll Dýrason and Georg Hólm. You’re playing with emotions, but you don’t want to force-feed it. “Of course, you have to be careful not to go full Disney on it. “If I don’t get goosebumps, then we have to work a bit more,” says Sveinsson. In a genre with a forbiddingly studious reputation, Sigur Rós had an elemental grace and a direct line to one’s tear ducts. As a non-anglophone post-rock band from a “tiny little island in the middle of nowhere”, they didn’t exactly dream of Madison Square Garden, but their second album, 1999’s Ágætis byrjun, was a word-of-mouth phenomenon whose cheerleaders included Radiohead, Coldplay, David Bowie and Cameron Crowe. When Sigur Rós formed in 1994 as teenagers, Birgisson says, they made music because “it gives you a purpose to live and be happy”. “Our main purpose is the music but obviously there is this thing called life that happens around it and you have to deal with it,” says Hólm. A band whose music inspired breathless celestial metaphors seemed to fall to earth with an ugly thud. “There were definitely points when me and Jónsi would go, well, I guess we’re a band but we’re not really doing anything.” Amid all of this, Birgisson split from Alex Somers, his partner of 16 years and frequent artistic collaborator. Now in their late 40s, they look like mismatched detectives reuniting on a cold case in a Nordic noir show. “It was strange,” says Hólm, sitting in the band’s Reykjavik headquarters with returning keyboardist Kjartan Sveinsson (who had left the band in 2013). Dýrason denied the allegations but resigned a few days later, temporarily reducing Sigur Rós to a transatlantic duo of Birgisson and bassist Georg “Goggi” Hólm. In September 2018, artist Meagan Boyd publicly accused drummer Orri Páll Dýrason of sexual assault five years earlier. They have all now been acquitted but Birgisson has been off the hook only since March. The band blamed an accounting error and repaid the debt plus interest, but faced a second prosecution for the same offence in 2020, which froze their assets. In March 2018, the Icelandic government accused Sigur Rós of evading 151m króna (£840,000) of tax between 20. The period the album emerged from was, he says, “depressing and heavy and intense”. “It’s a comfort blanket for us maybe,” agrees frontman Jón Þór “Jónsi” Birgisson from his home in Silver Lake, Los Angeles. Given the dramatic events in the band members’ lives during its long gestation, you suspect it serves a similar purpose for the Icelanders themselves. S igur Rós’s new album Átta, their first in a decade, is a tender and consoling piece of work that seems to extend a healing hand to the listener.
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