Back catalogue: Post Rock/Experimental

Review: Icelandic post-rock auteurs Sigur Ros return from a ten year creative silence with the ethereal and warming ATTA. Where 2013's Kveikur proved easily their darkest and most sonically menacing work to date, their decade-long respite has rewarded the trio with crippling reflection. Their first LP since the departure of drummer Orri Pall Dirason, whilst reinstating keyboardist Kjartan Sveinsson, who rejoined the band in 2022 following his departure not long after 2012's Valtari; the material here could be the most glacial and ambient they've ever conjured. With artwork featuring a flaming rainbow, vocalist Jonsi elaborates -"Trans and queer and gay rights have been trampled on so much recently. It's scary to see. Around the world also, it feels like we're going backwards." Embracing these woes, and utilising classical motifs to conjure swells of operatic, post-rock gloom, their sonic return is one of both hushed grace and worrying despondency.

Review: Icelandic trio Sigur Ros havent released a new album in a decade but now, following their signing with BMG, they finally break that run with ATTA, which is their eighth long player overall. The famously progressive, emotive, timeless sounds of the band haven't diminished over the last decade as signified by the first single - the rather epic 10-minute epic 'Blodberg'. The album writing process began in 2019 and was recorded across multiple continents and studios, including the legendary Abbey Road in the UK. The London Contemporary Orchestra feature on one of their most adventurous and accomplished albums in some time.

Review: Considered groundbreaking at the moment of its release, Sigur Ros' Agaetis byrjun, originally released in 1999, is a subtle and speechless blend of post-rock, ambient, and ether-electronica. The album propelled the Icelandic band to fame for its lush falsettos from Jonsi - which indulged a Cocteau Twins-esque conlang mixed with Icelandic, known among the band members as "Hopelandic." Tracks like 'Svefn-g-englar' and 'Staralfur' became instant classics, with a wide-berthed, cinematic feel, regaling the sense of standing at the edge of an ultimatum. The 2024 Vinyl Me, Please reissue now comes repackaged, offering it in a deluxe vinyl edition with remastered sound.

Review: Sigur Ros' fifth full-length LP (originally released in 2008) gets reissued by Piccadily Records this week, after having remained completely out of print worldwide for far too long. This 2xLP of post-modern ethereal folk is noted for being the band's first to be recorded, completed and toured all in the space of just one year - they had formerly toiled for years over their previous albums. It might also just be the best LP to highlight the band's 'realness'; the lyrics were originally meant to be in English, but they later returned to their own native Icelandic for a more authentic feel.

Review: The year is 1999 and while the sounds of Ibiza lounge house and blistering trance dominate much of the radio waves, elsewhere in Europe something very special is taking form. At this point in time, Sigur Ros had only put out one album, Vonn, in 1997, and followers who joined more recently, when the Icelandic oddities broke into major TV advertising campaigns and movie scores, but haven't looked back at their origins, might be surprised at what that one sounded like. Altogether darker, much more cacophonous.


Aegis Byrjun would follow the groundbreaking but largely unsung debut (Vonn only sold 300 copies in their own country) with a groundbreaking moment that set a precedent for everything they have done since. This is where big brands like Nissan pricked up ears, mesmerised by a sound that's at once alien, yet also deeply human, huge but intimate, classical yet contemporary, and fundamentally focused on triggering emotions.

Review: It should come as no surprise that the latest from Icelandic musical fantasists Sigur Ros was originally composed in either the 14th or 15th Century, and is written in the Edda tradition, a term used to describe to manuscripts that together make up the main sources of Norse mythology and Skaldic poetry. After all, this is a band that have been singing in their own imagined tongue since before most people cottoned on to them.

It's certainly the group's most gothic effort to date, an orchestral epic that also features the artists and composers Hilmar Orn Hilmarsson, Steindor Andersen and Maria Huld Markan Sigfusdottir, whose collective CV includes pioneering musical composition with computers and Rimur chanting. Their combined efforts feel steeped such timeless atmosphere your peripheral vision might as well be catching torchlights flickering off solid stone walls. Another work of extraordinary beauty, then.