“Ísjaki”

Sigur Rós became a trio at the start of 2013. Kjartan Sveinsson, their keyboardist since 1998, left in January, and on 22 March Jónsi, Georg Hólm and Orri Páll Dýrason announced Kveikur, a seventh album they described as more aggressive than anything they had made, with “Brennisteinn” as the first single. A month later, on 24 April, XL Recordings put out the second single, “Ísjaki”, Icelandic for “iceberg”. It came with the band’s first ever lyric video, and anyone who pre-ordered the album on iTunes got the song at once. A standalone digital single followed on 29 April.

The album was recorded in 2011 and 2012, mostly in the band’s rehearsal space and at Sundlaugin, a studio built inside an old swimming pool outside Reykjavík, where the trio cut basic tracks to 24-track tape in two week-long sessions. Jónsi recorded vocals and guitars with Alex Somers at Somers’s studio in town. Rich Costey mixed the record in Los Angeles, and the band then handed Costey’s stems to Somers to mix it a second time. The three members wrote “Ísjaki” and produced it themselves. For Kveikur they also built their own sampled instruments, bowing a ukulele and cymbals and mapping the sounds to a MIDI controller, and Somers has said this song started from the bowed ukulele, though “you’d never recognise it”.

The first write-ups disagreed about it. FACT called it the most uplifting thing yet heard from the album, with “chiming glockenspiels” and a “chest-beating chorus”. The Current heard a dark turn instead: a denser, more rhythmic and driving track than the band usually made. When the album arrived in June, Pitchfork’s Ian Cohen wrote that Dýrason’s drums keep pushing Jónsi’s call-and-response vocals forward. Drowned in Sound’s Christian Cottingham liked how catchy the chorus was and noted how the song turns dark at the end, as a drone builds and runs on into “Yfirborð”. The Guardian’s Dave Simpson counted it among the album’s moments of “glacial beauty”.

Kveikur came out on 17 June in Europe and 18 June in the US, with “Ísjaki” third of its nine tracks, at 5:03. It was Dýrason’s last album with the band: he left in 2018, and Sveinsson came back in 2022, the year before Átta. On the album they had called their most aggressive, the song critics heard as the pop one began as a bowed ukulele nobody would recognise.