This Is The Slow Rush

At the cessation of their tours in support of 2008's Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust, the members of Sigur Rós said their temporary farewells, congratulated each other on a job well done, and parted ways, only to reconvene a year later to start work on their sixth LP, the much more conveniently titled Valtari. In a perfect world, anyway – that year-break soon turned into four years, with smalL interludes in the form of films and compilations. So what gives?

“It's been a long time, yes,” bassist Georg Holm concedes. “It's weird. With this album, we did start working maybe three months after we finished the tour of the last record. So we have been working on-and-off ever since we came off the last tour. It's just been complicated and unfocused and bizarre, the whole process. But otherwise, we've been having children and being stay-at-home dads and things like that.

“I think it was very necessary for us to have a break from touring and being in the studio recording albums. It's been a bit of a rollercoaster ever since the year 2000. It's been a lot of work. Almost… you know… almost only work. It's always the band doing something. So I guess it felt like it was time to take a break. This break was maybe a little bit longer than we expected; we did decide, after the last tour, we said we would take a year off, and it became four years really. But we did some work in-between, so we're always working a little bit, even though it's been slower, these past four years, than normal.”

That slowness is no doubt, at least in part, attributable to the bizarre aura surrounding the album's gestation to which Holm makes reference. And although he says every studio experience is different, Valtari's was notably a difficult one to navigate.

“I think every time we do record an album, the process changes somehow,” Holm explains. “It's not necessarily something that we decide to do; it's usually something that just happens. Which is good, because you don't get stuck in the same place. But this record, it was bizarre because it was a record that we started working on and then gave up and then started again and then gave up again, and it kept on going like that, probably because we were feeling that the music that we had recorded for something that we wanted to call a record was so unfocused and everywhere. It didn't sound like a whole album. It sounded like bits and pieces, here and there. We were finding it difficult to find some sort of – well, using that word again – focus. It needed to sound like one album. We didn't know where to go with it. We didn't know which direction to go.

“It did sort of slowly become more focused, but not until the last session that we did, when we finally just went in and said, 'We have to finish this. We have some good music here; we need to finish it.' At the same time, we said, 'We need someone to help us do it,' and we got Alex Somers, who's Jonsi [Þór Birgisson]'s boyfriend, to help us with it, and I think he was definitely a huge help on this. I think he managed to focus all of us together and realise what we had. He was definitely a very big part of this album, and in focusing us together.”

It's a strange notion, a band that has been together for nearly two decades still needing an external prod to find a tangible, communally acceptable target on which to concentrate. But, then, perhaps the important thing is not the tribulations of the journey so much as how those experiencing such hurdles navigate their way through to their destination. Holm is philosophical about how the members of Sigur Rós managed to eventually pull off what they were attempting to do with this record, implying that if the band had stared down such uncertainty ten, or even five, years ago, that the end result may not have been as positive. Blessed be the present, then.

“I guess we've just grown up,” he says, laughing. “People change with time, and with it, the music, I think. Even though the core of the music is always the same for us, we all know what we like and what we enjoy playing together, but obviously as people we evolve and, like I said, grow up, in a way. So maybe our music is growing up a bit.”

As the listener moves through the album, it's not difficult to hear the focus and maturity of which Holm speaks. There's something about Valtari – which is perhaps admittedly not as “epic” as some of their earlier records – that permeates a sense of refined prettiness, no less dense than any of Sigur Rós' previous material, but nonetheless easier to grasp in one gulp. That's fortunate, since the album certainly swallows the listener whole in kind. Some have gone so far as to make allegories to a powerful avalanche, an image association with which Holm doesn't disagree. If anything, he thinks that pretty much perfectly encapsulates the album.

“I would have to say that that must be the title song off the record,” he says. “It was one of the last songs that we finished on this record, because we kept scratching our heads with that song. We didn't understand it. We really liked it, we really enjoyed it, but it was so heavy and so slow and… there was something beautiful about it, and eerie, but we didn't know how to finish it. In the end, we thought, 'Do we need to finish it? Is it good as it is?' because it doesn't have any structure to it. It doesn't have a classic pop song or rock song structure to it. It just…  it is what it is. And in the end, I think we just thought, 'This is what it is; it needs to be what it is, because this is how we like it. We don't need to focus it anymore. It's good as it is.' It is a bit of an avalanche, and it's one of the reasons why it's called Valtari, valtari meaning 'steamroller', because it just rolls over you and continues and doesn't stop for anything. You like it, or you don't. It doesn't really matter. It just continues.”

And it stays with you. It's certainly stayed with Holm. In fact, Valtari holds the special honour of having been the only Sigur Rós album to have graced his home entertainment system.

“It is true,” he admits. “I don't come home and put on a Sigur Rós record. I never do. One reason is, you spend probably several hundred hours working on a piece of music, and the last thing you want to do when you get home is put it on the record player and keep on listening to it. But this record sort of continues to surprise me. I'm finding elements that I kind of didn't know were there, and I think, for me, this album creates more emotion and more mental images in my head than any of our records. I go on a little trip every time I listen to it, and I really enjoy it.”

Which is not to say it's the album he's been waiting his whole life to make. It's a fair and impressively honest assessment given his involvement in its creation: Valtari is unquestionably a beautifully crafted piece of work, but how it speaks to each listener, at least according to Holm, will vary drastically from person to person.

“For me, personally, I think this is more like the album I was afraid to make,” he says. “I don't know; it's so out there. It's such a beast. It's not like you can walk onstage and play the whole album through and people will sing along. It's nothing like that. It's more like an album that you have to sit down and listen to. Headphones are good, obviously. For me, personally, it takes me on a trip, like I said, and it's very introverted, and I think it's a good word to describe it. I think this album is gonna mean something different to each person that listens to it, and I think that's fantastic. I think this is an album that has some meaning.”

Holm is sincere when he says that Valtari is a personal journey, bristling ever so slightly at a provocation as to what the album means to him as a musician, a member of the band that made it, and – most importantly – as a human being.

“Uh, I don't know – I guess that's personal,” he says hesitantly. “Because if I say what it means to me, then it might mean the same thing to another person, and it might ruin the meaning. But I do think it's something you listen to, and you have a response, you just go, 'Oh, yeah, this reminds me of something.' It could be anything. It could be a future thought, or a reminiscence, or anything, and I think that's great. If people get some meaning out of it, then I think we've succeeded.”