july 2023
Sigur Ros
ATTA
(Von Dur)
No music makers have made me cry more than the Icelandic band Sigur Ros.
I’ve done a lot of crying these past three years — more crying than I’d likely done in the entirety of my life prior to 2020. Don’t blame Sigur Ros. 2020 was a year of immeasurable loss, not only for myself, but for humanity. A loss not only of squad - and of the love and security that came with that squad - but a complete loss of self.
There’s a lot of crying in the video for “Andra,” in which Sigur Ros fans from all walks of life are invited to sit in front of a camera and share the band’s significance to their own losses and their own lives. They are then invited to listen to “Andra” for the first time. Real-time reactions are filmed. Tears are shed. A man younger than I admits thru his own face water: “There’s something sacred and holy about what that does on the inside.”
ATTA is Sigur Ros’ first new album in a decade — and what the songs that comprise the new album ‘do on the inside’ remains as significant as anything else the band has produced since the late 1990s. When you consider Sigur Ros’ history of critical acclaim over that 25 year stretch - when you consider the amount of tears shed - this is a compliment of the highest order.
Sigur Ros albums are paintings, meant to be absorbed wholly and deeply, and ATTA is no exception. Fortunately, this is an ambitious and groundbreaking band that has always commanded that sort of attention, fashioning new material slow in pace, vast in scope, and full of lengthy quiet moments that often make your body shiver and your lip quiver.
The truest testimony to the band’s impact lies in the fact that most of us affected by Sigur Ros aren’t absorbing any lyrics, at least ones that we can understand. Throughout the band’s history, vocalist Jonsi has mostly sung in Icelandic, or in a melodic language he and the band created called Vonlenska. This remains a strength rather than some pretentious gimmick, considering Jonsi’s masterful use of voice melody and how critical it is to Sigur Ros’ sonic palette.
ATTA feels just a shade darker than most of its predecessors, a shade softer - perhaps reflective of modern times. ”Blooberg” is the album’s doom-and-gloom symphony. The video for the song takes place in an endless desert wasteland littered with corpses. It’s a theme more fit for death metal, and yet in Sigur Ros’ hands, loss so massive becomes somehow poignant and beautiful.
Yep, I’ve cried a lot these past three years. I continue to cry. But today, the tears feel a little different — the losses still feel deep, but there’s gratitude in that sometimes uncontrollable release, too. There’s even some hope, often felt alongside the overwhelming pressure of basic existence and human morality.
My 2023 tears are a saline solution of mixed emotions, a potion that feels aptly like that feeling you get when you listen to Sigur Ros. You cry without often knowing why. You are simply moved. Something stirs in you. Some part of you that feels sacred and holy.
”8” — the last song on the band’s eighth album — ends with a whisper rather than a crescendo and nary a promise that we’ll hear from Sigur Ros again anytime soon. For now, we are left to enjoy a new series of whispers and crescendoes, of dark and light, joy and sadness.
Maybe, like me, you love Sigur Ros - you weep over their music - because you recognize that listening can feel akin to reliving the most dramatic parts of life — the best parts and the worst — the victories and the failures, the births and the deaths, the good fortune and the bad mistakes — and you can discover the beauty in all of it.
