After Years Of Success, Sigur Ros Are Still Pinching Themselves

When you get to the size of Sigur Ros — the Icelandic post-rock icons whose latest round of Australian shows are in legit arenas — it's hard to find new frontiers. But, since the release of their last LP, 2013's Kveikur, the band have lived out a pair of pure nerd dreams: appearing, in animated form, on The Simpsons in 2013, and, then, a year later, in the flesh on Game Of Thrones.

"We were actually on tour when we got the phone call from our manager saying 'The Simpsons want you to score an episode,'" says the band's 41-year-old bassist/keyboardist Georg Holm. "We thought: 'Wow, that's amazing!' We couldn't remember anyone who'd scored an episode of The Simpsons, and this is a TV show that has been going forever, that is an icon. We did the score while we were on tour, backstage. We didn't have to be anywhere. We didn't have to be in San Francisco, or Los Angeles, or wherever it is that they do that show. I don't know!

"When we finished that, we were joking around, saying 'How can we top being on The Simpsons?' The only thing we thought that could top that, or at least equal it, was being asked to be on Game Of Thrones. In my memory, there was only like a two-week gap between when we finished our Simpsons score and then getting another phone call from our manager, saying 'Hey, they want you to be on Game Of Thrones'.

"Game Of Thrones was very easy musical work - the song had already been written, we just needed to do our thing to it - but then we had to be there, in Croatia, for filming."

"It was so much fun, the whole thing, that whole time. They were so different. There was a lot of musical work that went into The Simpsons thing, and then nothing else. But then Game Of Thrones was very easy musical work — the song had already been written, we just needed to do our thing to it — but then we had to be there, in Croatia, for filming. It was a completely different thing to do. But equally exciting."

It's all a long, long way to come for a band from Reykjavik. Holm and Sigur Ros' original drummer, Agust Aevar Gunnarsson, "started about 20 or 30 different bands" in high school, often just the two of them. "In some ways, it was all the same band, and I feel like I'm still in that band," Holm recounts. "Because, eventually, Agust and I would form a band with Jonsi, and that would go on to become Sigur Ros."

That teenaged trio's "eureka moment" was when they spent five hours together in a studio in 1994 ("we look at each other like 'holy shit, this is really good!'"), but even as they were emboldened to make their own individual sound - minted perfectly with their breakout second LP, 1999's Agaetis Byrjun - they hardly expected it'd lead to global fame and fortune. "It's pure joy. Absolutely amazing. Nothing we ever could've expected," Holm beams. "We're just these three guys from Iceland who hardly know how to play our instruments, and sing in Icelandic.

"If you'd told me when I was 16 or 17, just starting out playing in bands that nobody cared about, that soon I would be travelling the world, several times over, playing for thousands of people, who all sing along to our songs, even though they're in Icelandic, no matter where we are in the world, I would've just said 'Yeah, right'. There's no way we could've believed this was going to happen until it actually did."

Sigur Ros are currently at work on their eighth LP. "None of us really know where we are at," Holm says; guessing that they're 85% in, song-wise, feeling "like we need maybe two, maybe three more songs before we can start to understand it as a full record". Fitting their cinematic sound, the trio never approach songs or albums with ideas or themes in mind. "We just start making music, and let the music dictate, on its own, where it wants to go," offers Holm. "I can't remember us ever sitting down and saying we want to create something happy, or sad, or ecstatic."

When asked to describe the sound of the songs on their forthcoming album, though, Holm is more forthcoming. "The music that we're working on is very mixed, with very, very new sounds that I haven't heard us creating before. There's a very, very broad spectrum to it. To me, some of it is almost nostalgic; it reminds me of when I was younger, it has this aggression, the kind that we used to put into our music.

"When we create aggressive music, it's not because we're angry. It's because we're happy. It's an energy thing. When we create this really, really slow, melancholic music, it's because we're unhappy. Musically, we're beautiful when we're unhappy, and aggressive when we're happy. That might sound contradictory, but that's the way it's always been with this band."