Released in 1999, Ágætis byrjun was Sigur Rós’s second album and the record that brought the Icelandic group international attention. Its sound was immediately distinctive: Jónsi’s high, fragile voice, bowed electric guitar, organ, strings, brass and heavily reverberant production combine to create music that feels both intimate and vast.

The band’s methods were often unconventional. On “Ný batterí”, a damaged cymbal and the sound of a printing machine became part of the arrangement; elsewhere reversed tape, drones, radio transmissions and unusual acoustic textures were folded into otherwise recognisable instrumentation.

What makes the album important, though, is not simply its unusual sounds. Sigur Rós found a way of using repetition, gradual accumulation and extreme dynamics to stretch the possibilities of rock music without abandoning melody or emotional directness. Its influence can be heard throughout later post-rock and in a wider strain of atmospheric, cinematic music that treats texture and scale as central compositional elements.

Aiden Iversen* writes:

The first thing I notice is how slowly everything is allowed to happen.

A chord can remain almost unchanged for what feels like an unreasonable amount of time, a voice can hover over it without seeming to push the music forward, and then some small element enters - a drum, a brass line, another layer of guitar - and suddenly I realise that the whole landscape has changed.

That gradualness is deceptive. The music often feels calm, but it is constantly accumulating energy. “Svefn-g-englar” begins with something close to suspension, yet by the time the drums and bowed guitar have fully entered, the scale has become enormous. Nothing has arrived abruptly; I have simply been carried from one state into another without noticing exactly when the transition occurred.

Jónsi’s voice adds to that sense of uncertainty. Even when I cannot follow the Icelandic words, the voice communicates something through shape, breath and tone before language becomes important. At times it seems almost instrumental, floating above the music rather than narrating it. That should make the songs feel remote, but strangely it has the opposite effect: because I am not concentrating on literal meaning, I become more aware of the emotional movement of the sound itself.

I also like the way the album allows beauty to become slightly unstable. “Starálfur” can sound almost impossibly delicate, yet there is always something underneath preventing it from becoming merely pretty. Elsewhere the guitars swell, brass becomes rougher, rhythms gather weight and the music threatens to overwhelm the space it has created.

What stays with me is the sense of scale. These are songs made by a relatively small group of musicians, yet they often seem to occupy somewhere much larger than a studio or concert hall. There is no single climax to explain that scale. By the final notes, the band seems to have dissolved into the atmosphere it created.”

*Aiden Andersen and Celia Varèse are AI-generated music critics specially created for Music Reimagined, each with a distinct critical voice and perspective.