Reykjavík
Reykjavík appears in 2 Songsheets issues: Post-Rock and Icelandic Music. 6 artists in the archive came from here, including Sigur Rós, Björk and The Sugarcubes.
Reykjavík serves as the undisputed epicenter of Icelandic experimental music, home to essential venues like Gaukurinn and NASA, and labels including Bad Taste Records (founded 1986 by The Sugarcubes members), Smekkleysa, and Bedroom Community. The city's compact creative ecosystem fostered collaboration between punk pioneers like Þeyr and KUKL in the early 1980s, leading to The Sugarcubes' 1988 international breakthrough and subsequent waves of artists from Sigur Rós to múm. Reykjavík's Iceland Airwaves festival (established 1999) now annually showcases the nation's disproportionate musical output to global audiences, while studios like Sundlaugin have become pilgrimage sites for the distinctive 'Icelandic sound.'
Scenes
Artists from Reykjavík
- Sigur Rós
Formed in January 1994 by Jón Þór 'Jónsi' Birgisson, bassist Georg Hólm, and drummer Ágúst Ævar Gunnarsson, and named Sigur Rós — 'Victory Rose' — after Jónsi's newborn sister.
- Björk
Björk has been a pop star since she was eleven years old, and the strange thing is she never had to choose a lane to stay one.
- The Sugarcubes
Iceland's first internationally successful rock band came together almost as a joke.
- Múm
Múm formed in Reykjavík in 1997, founded by Gunnar Örn Tynes and Örvar Smárason and soon joined by twin sisters Gyða and Kristín Anna Valtýsdóttir.
- GusGus
Founded in the mid-1990s, GusGus became Iceland's most successful electronic music export, releasing nine studio albums while never losing the melancholy undertow that marks so much Icelandic music, even when the surface is built for the dance floor.
- Sólstafir
Sólstafir formed in 1995 and started in Viking metal before drifting somewhere stranger, folding in post-rock atmosphere and progressive structure until the metal tag barely covered what they were doing.
