Sigur Ros Atta 2LP

Following its surprise digital release, Sigur Rós' first new studio album in ten years, Átta, is their most intimate and emotionally direct record to date. Few bands cut through the noise and distractions of the world to bring you a pure elemental truth or feeling like Sigur Rós. As you hear on Átta, there's a new compulsion and drive to the band that comes with the new formation of the lineup. Multi-instrumentalist Kjartan Sveinsson is back in the fold - having left the band in 2012 - to join frontman Jónsi and bassist Georg Holm. Recorded across multiple continents - in the band's Sundlaugin studio in Iceland, the legendary Abbey Road in the UK and a number of studios in the US - Átta leans heavily towards the orchestral and touches on everything that has made Sigur Rós one of the most ambitious and acclaimed bands of recent times, with close to ten million albums sold, whilst signposting an exciting and expansive possibility for their future. Átta prominently features the London Contemporary Orchestra conducted by Robert Ames, alongside brass performed by longtime Icelandic collaborators Brassgat í bala. It is mixed and co-produced by another frequent collaborator Paul Corley, alongside the band.

Recorded in 2022 and inspired by the idea of unity in the face of overwhelming turmoil - climatic, socio-political, viral, and otherwise - the persistently warm and majestic, nearly hour-long ÁTTA often resembles a series of ambient, gradually expanding and subsiding, amorphous sound shapes more than songs....ÁTTA continually juxtaposes sparseness and lavishness, low tones and high notes, and ascending and descending harmonic progressions, culminating in the nearly ten-minute epic '8,' which includes the lyrics 'Sånne ting som du har sett på filmer' ('Things like you put on film'). While not the project's most mind-bending or boundary-pushing album, it's their most stunningly gorgeous, and a successful, timely countermeasure to the symbolic cover art depicting a rainbow in flames.