SYDNEY, AU. (EMI MUSIC AUSTRALIA) - 'The music comes from a very special place deep inside the mountains of Iceland,' laughs Kjartan, making light of critics who lazily link the band's unique sound to the geographic weirdness of Iceland itself. Sigur Rós, he says, are just like any other band – almost. 'There are no Sigur Rós commandments, there is nothing like that. Of course, we have to argue about every single thing, but that is fine.'
'I think that we are unable to create unless we do it completely on our own terms,' says Georg. 'But I think we amazed ourselves with this record - how quickly we finished it. When we were writing the songs for this record we just came in and we all felt like we were doing something new. We were starting fresh. We had done the last record, we had toured it - it's over and done with. It's like almost four years of the same songs. So, it was like leaving something behind and starting over again.'
The band deliberately put a halt to live performances to ensure anything they wrote towards the album would remain fresh. As a result only two of the songs on Takk… have ever been heard live, with the remaining nine tracks taking off in directions only hinted at by the band's previous work. Where before the band might have worked through a concept to its conclusion ('Sometimes we would just come in and play the same three chords or whatever, the same loop or the same riff for an hour,' recalls Georg), they now burned through ideas with scant regard.
'Sometimes we are writing a song in the studio and we come back a day after and no one remembers it,' says Kjartan. 'That's a sign that the song wasn't good enough, so we just forget about it.' 'We wrote like 20 songs one month and we only remembered three of them,' says Georg. 'And I think that because we wrote songs and then recorded them at the same time, it was a lot of fun - some of them were only half written when we recorded them.'
'And we laid down the order of the tracks quite early in the process, which we never do,' says Kjartan. 'In the mastering we always change the order up to the last minute, but this one was kind of different. We felt how it was supposed to sound right. Yeah, maybe it means that it is a good album.'
Pressed harder to describe what makes a 'good album', words – especially English words – fail. 'Our first record was called ‘Hope' in Icelandic (1997's Von),' says Georg, 'because when we first started playing this sort of music it … I don't know… I think that's something that we all feel when we are playing the songs and writing them. In melancholy there is always this little bit of hope. It's sort of a nice feeling. It's ‘introvert' - is that the correct word? You feel inside yourself, you feel a bit down, but you feel good about something, there's something really nice, something warm, somewhere in the music.'
'Yes, this album would be our happy album,' laughs Kjartan.
