Since the international breakthrough of The Sugarcubes and Björk in the late 1980s, the Anglophone discourse surrounding Icelandic popular music has proven to be the latest instance of a long history of representation in which the North Atlantic island is imagined as an icy periphery on the edge of European civilization. This mode of representation is especially prominent in the discourse surrounding post-rock band Sigur Rós. This article offers a critical reading of the band's reception in the Anglo-American music press during the period of their breakthrough in the UK and USA. Interpretative strategies among listeners and critics are scrutinised using the concept of borealism (Schram 2011) in order to examine attitudes towards the Nordic regions evident in the portrayals of Sigur Rós. Reception issues then form the basis for a musical analysis of a seminal track in the band's history, aiming to demonstrate how specific details in Sigur Rós's style relate to its reception and the discourse surrounding it. The article finds that much of the metaphorical language present in the band's reception can be linked to techniques of musical spatiality, the unusual sound of the bowed electric guitar and non-normative uses of voice and language.

This article bridges ecocriticism and popular music analysis in a close reading of three examples that respond musically to environmental debates in Iceland during the period 2006-2009. Political-environmental tensions in Iceland reached a heated level in the mid-2000s with the construction of the Kárahnjúkar hydropower project, which elicited a string of artistic and musical responses.While considering Valgeir Sigurðsson's "Grýlukvaeði," Björk's "Náttúra," and Sigur Rós's "Vaka," this article argues that incorporating textual analysis and interpretation is key in forging an ecocritical study of popular music.

This article presents a musicological and ecocritical close reading of the song "Brennisteinn" ("sulphur" or, literally, "burning rock") by the acclaimed post-rock band Sigur Rós. The songand its accompanying music video-features musical, lyrical, and audiovisual means of registering the turbulence of living in volcanic landscapes. My analysis of Sigur Rós's music opens up a window into an Icelandic cultural history of inhabiting a risky Earth, a condition captured by anthropologist Gísli Pálsson's concept of geosociality, which emerged from his ethnography in communities living with volcanoes. Geosociality allows for a "down to earth" perspective that accounts for the liveliness of the ground below our feet. Likewise, in Sigur Rós's "Brennisteinn", we encounter a musical imagination of the geologic that poses a challenge to hegemonic concepts of nature founded on notions of equilibrium and permanence. The article culminates with a consideration of what such a geologically minded aesthetics can offer us in the age of the Anthropocene.

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The acclaimed television miniseries Chernobyl (2019) features an eerie soundtrack that musicalizes the silence of radioactivity. Hildur Guðnadóttir’s score is composed of field recordings from a nuclear power plant, treated and fitted together in ways that blur the lines between music and sound design. The immersive qualities of the soundtrack provide television audiences with new means of sensing the invisible ecological consequences of human activity.