Snow Choirs and Synth Fog: The Myth of Icelandic Sound

What makes Icelandic music sound so… Icelandic?

Iceland cultivates the kind silence that sits heavy in your ears after snowfall, thick enough to hear your own pulse. It’s not empty. It’s fertile. You can hear it in the way Sigur Rós lets a single piano note hang until it dissolves into wind, or how Björk’s voice sometimes emerges so gradually from the quiet that you’re not sure when the singing began.

This is geology translated into sound, not minimalism for effect.

After visiting Iceland back in February, I would assume the landscape teaches patience. When your backyard contains geysers that take centuries to boil and glaciers that groan like sleeping giants, you learn music doesn’t need to rush. An Icelandic friend once joked that their national anthem should just be someone holding a sustained hum for seven minutes. “With optional avalanche accompaniment.” But he wasn’t wrong. There’s a reason their most famous export sounds like it’s being played inside a glacier crackling with ancient ice, vibrating through basalt columns.

Even the pop music carries this weight. Of Monsters and Men don’t so much start songs as uncover them, like archaeologists brushing dust off buried melodies. The silence isn’t broken; it’s invited to participate. You can trace it back to the weather when blizzards erase horizons and summer nights never darken, sound becomes navigation. A fiddle tune isn’t entertainment; it’s a rope line through the whiteout.

What passes for a ballad elsewhere would be far too loud here. Icelandic love songs sound like they’re being whispered into the curve of a lover’s shoulder, fully aware that the wind might steal the words halfway. The humour’s the same: dry as volcanic ash, delivered so deadpan you might miss the joke until it’s already sunk in.

This is music that remembers its birthplace. That knows some truths can only be carried by frequencies lower than human speech. That treats silence not as a void to fill, but as the most honest instrument they’ve got. After all, when your country regularly reminds you how small you are, shouting seems terribly gauche. Better to let the empty spaces speak. They usually have more interesting things to say.

Voice: Language of the Elemental

What I’ve found is that Icelandic singers don't so much use language as let it use them. There's a moment in every Björk song where the words stop being words and become something else entirely: geological formations, weather systems, the sound a raven's wings make when they brush against lava rock. when she shapes “army of me” into something between a battle cry and a seismic tremor in Army of Me. The consonants aren't so much pronounced as weathered, rounded smooth by centuries of Nordic winds. This isn't vocal acrobatics for show. It's the landscape speaking through human vocal cords.  

Hopelandic, that invented language Sigur Rós' Jónsi Birgisson murmurs like sacred texts, should be nonsense. Instead, it feels more truthful than any dictionary. The syllables aren't arbitrary; they're shaped by breath and echo, by what the throat needs to do rather than what the mind wants to say. To me, listening to Svefn-g-englar is like overhearing a conversation between hot springs, all glottal stops and whispered consonants that dissolve into the air like steam. You don't understand it. You feel it in your sternum.  

Even when singing in proper Icelandic, there's a quality to the delivery that makes English sound terribly pedestrian by comparison. Of Monsters and Men could be reciting a grocery list and it would still sound like a Viking incantation. It's in the way consonants stack like basalt columns, how vowels stretch like tundra under midnight sun. The language carries its origins in every syllable — those hard 'k's forged in volcanic fires, the undulating 'r's that mimic river currents.  

This vocal strangeness isn't affectation. It's inevitability. When your country has more active volcanoes than traffic lights, when the northern lights flicker above your childhood playground, your relationship with sound changes. The Icelandic friend I’ve mentioned earlier once described their traditional singing style as “trying not to wake the trolls”. He was joking. Probably. There's always been something shamanic about their music — less performance, more channeling. You don't sing at the landscape here. You sing with it.  

The humour surfaces in unexpected places. I absolutely love that deadpan Icelandic wit. The best way I could describe it is as dry as pumice, delivered with the same straight face as a weather warning for horizontal hail. It's telling that their most famous musical export is a band whose frontman sings through a guitar bow, as if even their rock stars can't be bothered with conventional methods.  

What passes for avant-garde elsewhere is simply folk tradition here. Throat-singing? That's just what happens when you grow up listening to wind howl through canyons. The way Ásgeir's voice floats above his melodies like mist on a lake? Standard technique when you're used to your voice carrying across kilometres of empty moorland. Even their pop stars sound like they're broadcasting from some liminal space between myth and modernity.  

There's a particular magic to hearing Icelandic in song that evaporates in translation. The word "gluggaveður" meaning weather so beautiful you can only appreciate it from indoors, takes on new dimensions when sung by a choir, the 'gg's rattling like sleet against windowpanes. "Hafssól" (sun on the sea) stretches into something luminous when voiced by someone who's seen that particular light dance on the North Atlantic.  

This is why their music travels so well while remaining stubbornly local. You don't need to understand Icelandic to feel the longing in a Sigur Rós ballad, or the fury in a Hatari anthem. The language has been sculpted by the elements, and the elements need no translation. When Jónsi's voice cracks on a high note, it's the sound of ice splitting. When Björk gasps between phrases, it's the hitch in the wind before a storm.  

Perhaps this is the real Icelandic vocal trick: making the personal planetary. A breakup song becomes continental drift. A lullaby turns into the aurora borealis. They sing not about their country, but from it, letting the volcanoes and geysers harmonise. The rest of us are just eavesdropping on a conversation that began millennia before we arrived, and will continue long after we've turned to dust.  

Next time you listen to Icelandic music, don't try to parse the lyrics. Let them wash over you like a warm current from the Gulf Stream. In my opinion, the meaning isn't in the words, instead it's in the spaces between them — the silence that remembers when this was all just fire and ice.

Atmosphere: Fog as Arrangement

The first thing you notice is how the air changes. Icelandic compositions don't enter your ears so much as alter the oxygen content in the room. Hildur Guðnadóttir's cello exhales notes, like warm breath meeting cold air until the vibrations condense into something between sound and weather. I particularly find myself leaning forward, not to hear better, but because the music has quietly shifted the room's gravity.

This is music composed for the spaces between. The moments when midnight sun bleeds into morning fog. When geothermal steam obscures entire valleys. In my opinion, Jóhann Jóhannsson understood this better than anyone — his compositions don't build towards climaxes so much as they accumulate like snowfall on a windowsill. The strings in Flight From The City don't swell with Hollywood urgency; they drift sideways, each bow stroke leaving frost patterns on the glass of your speakers.

The technical choices feel inevitable once you've stood on an Icelandic hillside. Reverbs aren't added, instead harvested from empty swimming pools and abandoned fish factories. Pauses between notes stretch like Arctic twilights. Even the electronics behave differently here as Björk's beats don't punch through the mix so much as bubble up through thermal springs, all glitchy effervescence and unexpected heat.

There's a particular genius to making absence feel tangible. When Sigur Rós lets a chord hang unresolved for half a minute, it's accurate geography. This is a country where the ground might open without warning, where northern lights flicker then vanish like a dream upon waking. Of course their music breathes like something alive. Of course it leaves spaces for ghosts.

I’d imagine the mixing desks in Reykjavík's studios must be the most patient in the world. Engineers spend whole afternoons capturing the sound of bow hairs grazing cello strings, the creak of piano pedals underfoot, the accidental harmonics when a violin's tuning slips mid-take. These aren't mistakes to be edited out, they're the point. Perfection would be obscene in a land where mountains still reshape themselves annually.

Live performances become séances. Audiences don't cheer so much as hold their breath, afraid to disrupt the delicate equilibrium between sound and silence. The air in Harpa Concert Hall often feels thicker during encores, as if hundreds of listeners exhaling in unison have accidentally composed their own atmospheric pressure system.

What sounds like minimalism to foreign ears is actually maximalism of the most Icelandic sort. Why use ten notes when two will do? Why force resolution when the landscape offers none? This music doesn't want to entertain you — it wants to rewild your nervous system. To remind your bones that before playlists, before streaming, before instruments even existed, there was only wind through basalt columns and water cutting through ancient ice.

I particularly find that the genius lies in the restraint, in knowing that the most powerful note is often the one not played. That true quiet is pregnant with everything unsaid. Like fog rolling into Reykjavík harbour, these compositions don't announce their arrival. They simply appear until the city becomes softer at the edges, until the familiar turns mysterious, until you forget whether the sound is coming from your speakers or from somewhere deep in the volcanic rock beneath your feet.

Melancholy: The National Moodboard

In some ways, Icelandic melancholy crystallises. It’s in the way a Sigur Rós chord progression lingers like the last amber glow of sunset at midnight in June — present but already slipping away. This isn’t depression with a Spotify algorithm. It’s something far more interesting: sorrow that has made peace with its own permanence, like moss growing over a lava field.  

The genius lies in its patience. When Björk sings “it’s not meant to be a strife, it’s not meant to be a struggle uphill” on Undo, she might as well be describing the national approach to emotional weather. The heartbreak in her voice doesn’t build to catharsis, instead it settles in like winter, until you stop fighting the cold and start noticing how the frost patterns rearrange themselves each morning.  

Hildur Guðnadóttir’s Chernobyl soundtrack understood this better than most disaster scores. While Hollywood would have gone for shrieking violins, she chose cello tones that moved like radiation through empty corridors — not frightening because they attacked the ears, but because they refused to leave. The horror wasn’t in the notes themselves, but in the spaces between them, where the listener’s own dread could pool and stagnate.  

This melancholy resists easy metaphors. It’s not “blue”, unless you count the particular grey-blue of a glacier’s underbelly. It doesn’t “soar” or “crash”, it accumulates like snowfall on a windowsill that eventually requires the whole house to shift its weight.

The humour, when it comes, is drier than volcanic ash. Sigur Rós titling an album ( ) and calling it a concept piece about “whatever you want it to be”. Björk deadpanning that her most devastating love songs were inspired by “just, you know, normal Tuesday stuff”. Even their melancholia refuses to take itself too seriously. It simply exists, as matter-of-fact as a weather report warning of horizontal sleet.  

What sounds like resignation to foreign ears is actually profound emotional honesty. Of Monsters and Men describe broken hearts with the clinical precision of geologists cataloguing fault lines. The power comes from the lack of histrionics; when the entire landscape reminds you daily of impermanence, you learn to treat emotions as transient weather systems rather than existential crises.  

This approach breeds strange comforts. There’s solidarity in shared melancholy, a sense that if the entire nation can collectively sigh through its music, perhaps your own private sorrows aren’t so isolating after all. The national radio station’s midnight playlist understands this, it’s all piano pieces that sound like they’re being played in empty swimming pools, and electronic tracks that pulse like the northern lights on a cloudy night. Not depressing. Just... present.  

Live performances become secular seances. Audiences don’t wave lighters during ballads — they stand perfectly still, as if moving might disrupt the delicate equilibrium between sound and silence. When Jónsi’s voice cracks during Sæglópur, the crowd’s collective inhale isn’t pity; it’s recognition. Of course it hurts. Everything alive hurts sometimes. The glaciers know this. The volcanoes definitely know this.  

Perhaps this explains why their melancholy travels so well while remaining distinctly Icelandic. You don’t need to have survived a Reykjavík winter to recognise the emotional landscape in Ásgeir’s Going Home but if you have, the song hits with the quiet force of a snowdrift finally sliding off a roof. It’s the sound of resilience that stopped needing to prove itself long ago.  

The lesson isn’t that life is sad. It’s that sadness, properly understood, is just another way of being alive. Like their volcanoes and hot springs, Icelandic musicians understand that the same forces that create fissures also generate geothermal warmth. So they let the chords hang. They allow the tears to freeze on their cheeks. They write songs that move at glacial speeds because some truths can’t be rushed. Therefore, Icelandic melancholy doesn’t build to release, it accumulates until you realise the weight was never the problem. The problem was thinking you needed to carry it alone.

Myth: The Sound of the Unseen

In Iceland, stories thread through moss-covered rocks and quiet hills. Choirs that sound like ghosts. Harps that shimmer like light on snow. A melody might loop in on itself endlessly, as if unsure whether it’s meant for humans or some other audience. And somewhere in that mix of glacial stillness and geothermal drama, music begins to feel less like a composition and more like an echo. Not of something that was, but of something that still is. It’s the sound of myth breathed softly through synthesisers, bowed into cellos, scattered across choirs that sound uncannily like weather. That mythic sensibility leaks into the music. You hear things that feel half-visible. 

What sounds like fantasy to outsiders feels like simple realism in Reykjavík. When 54% of your population genuinely believes in elves, writing music for them becomes less whimsy than good manners. The famous story about road construction diverting around suspected elf habitats stops being a cute anecdote and starts explaining why Icelandic composers leave such deliberate spaces in their arrangements, not quite empty, but respectfully reserved.  

There’s a specific kind of hush that coats the Icelandic landscape, a hush so vast it can feel sentient. It isn't silence, exactly. More like a pause held just long enough to let something else speak — wind, snow, the half-memory of a grandmother's tale about a rock that moves when no one is looking. That hush exists in the music too. In the glacial repetitions of Sigur Rós, where songs unfold not in verses but in seasons. In Jóhann Jóhannsson’s scores, where each note feels like it has walked for miles in snow before arriving. In Guðnadóttir’s cello lines, which crack open like ice under booted feet: delicate, dangerous, and deeply alive.

To describe Icelandic music as “ethereal” is to reach for a word that is already worn at the seams. It’s become the sonic equivalent of “quaint”, perhaps misapplied and half-meant. What’s actually happening is something stranger. Stranger and older. There is folklore in the music, but not as decoration. It isn’t draped in elf ears and fairy dust like a costume, whereas it’s sewn into the sonic DNA, as you don’t hear elves in the music because someone wanted you to. You hear them because they’re still there.

It’s telling that a majority of Icelanders genuinely believe in huldufólk (the hidden people). Not believe as in light-hearted festival folklore, but believe as in pause-the-roadworks-we-might-disturb-them levels of belief. In that context, Hopelandic — Sigur Rós’s invented, phonetic language — stops sounding like art school abstraction and starts sounding like fluency in something ancient. Like the song had words once, but forgot them, and what’s left is emotional residue.

I remember standing near Dimmuborgir, a lava field in the north where legend says Satan landed after being cast from heaven. There’s a quiet there that doesn’t feel peaceful, it feels sentient. As if the land is waiting for you to say something worth listening to. Polite unease and reverent discomfort sits at the centre of Icelandic sound. The music is trying to remember. And maybe remind you, too.

There’s a reason this music travels so well while remaining so local. It doesn’t quite carry a passport. It carries a weather system. A kind of sonic microclimate that drifts into your bones before your ears have finished adjusting. You don’t have to know Iceland to feel its music, but it helps to have lived in solitude long enough to recognise the way it pulses — slowly, deliberately, like breath fogging on glass. The ache isn’t homesickness, instead it’s world-sickness. That slow churn of longing for something unnamed and unmapped, but once known.

And then, there’s humour. A very specific Icelandic kind. Dry, sly, bone-deep. A joke that takes two hours and a glacier crossing to land. You can hear it in Björk, most of all. People forget, in their rush to paint her as pixie or prophet, that she’s deeply funny. Even when she's singing about planetary grief or post-breakup anatomy, there's a wink. Not because she's mocking emotion, but because she understands that awe and absurdity are siblings. That you can sob and giggle in the same breath and still mean both entirely.

What remains so powerful about Icelandic sound is its commitment to slowness and scale. In a world that increasingly favours immediacy and compression, it dares to stretch. To loop. To repeat. Not as laziness, but as ritual. The repetition becomes a kind of reverence, a reminder that listening is a form of faith. Not in anything specific, no deity or doctrine, but in the possibility that something wordless can still reach you. That a synth pad, layered just so, can undo a bad week. That a cello, bowed low and long, can teach you to breathe again.

The myth, then, is not just in the subject matter. It’s in the method. These songs are conjured., perhaps scored with the patience of stone, produced with the delicacy of snow falling into itself. They don’t demand belief. They assume it. And in doing so, they offer a kind of sonic hospitality that feels both ancient and entirely new. A room you enter quietly, barefoot, unsure whether you’re a guest or a ghost.

Solitude: The Social Sound of Isolation

Over the years, I’ve found that there’s a particular kind of companionship that only isolation can breed. The kind that doesn’t chatter or ask questions, but sits beside you in the dark and lets the silence do most of the talking. Icelandic music gets this. It doesn’t treat solitude like a problem, nor does it frame itself as a temporary state to be rushed through on the way to something louder. Instead, it listens to solitude like a friend who has lived long enough to earn your respect. It pours it a drink. Lights a candle. And then records a symphony in its honour.

When Jónsi sings in that cracked, spectral falsetto of his, it doesn’t sound like a performance. It sounds like he’s talking to the walls. Or the glaciers. Or a lover long buried under snow. There's an unshowy intimacy to it. Like stumbling upon someone humming while they make bread at 3 a.m. You weren’t supposed to hear it, but now that you have, you can’t forget it. I’d like to imagine Icelandic music whispers because it’s not entirely sure anyone is listening, and somehow, that makes it feel truer.

There’s something unusually democratic about how Icelandic artists handle sound. It isn’t all polished to a capitalist gleam. It isn’t always expensive. Sometimes it’s built from borrowed gear, field recordings, a synth that only half works. A song might include the clunk of a piano pedal, the rattle of a radiator, the offhanded sigh of someone frustrated by the weather. These aren’t errors, they’re artefacts. Texture. Presence. The musical equivalent of a hair left on a jumper. Or scratch left on a door handle. Proof that someone was there.

Isolation in Iceland is more so a chorus. You don’t feel alone listening to these records. You feel accompanied by the very act of listening. It’s like reading a diary where the writer doesn’t mind if you peek, as long as you read slowly. Even collaborations retain this strange privacy, I think of the work between Ólafur Arnalds and Nils Frahm — it’s less of a duet and more like two people writing letters in the same room, aware of each other, but not needing to speak. That’s the kind of sociality Icelandic music achieves: parallel solitude, respectful proximity.

The studios themselves seem built for this kind of communion. There are places where microphones are set up beside waterfalls, where engineers worry about sea spray damaging cables. In Reykjavik’s Greenhouse Studio, it’s not unheard of for a session to pause because the northern lights came out and everyone agreed it would be rude not to go and look. There’s no urgency to seal off sound. No obsession with perfection. If a dog barks in the distance or the wind rattles the windows, it stays. Music is treated less like a product and more like an artefact of a particular moment — half song, half timestamp.

This philosophy travels with a peculiar elegance. It reaches you wherever you are but never feels like it was trying to. You don’t need to have lived through an Icelandic winter to recognise the emotion in Sóley’s cracked piano or in Sin Fang’s blurry confessions, but if you have, the sound feels like memory being gently reassembled. The music has the posture of someone who doesn’t expect you to understand, but is willing to sit beside you anyway, just in case you do.

Even the genre lines feel different in this context. Classical composers drift into pop. Folk merges with electronica. There’s little effort to define things precisely. You get the sense that no one’s particularly bothered whether it lands in a playlist called “Melancholy Nordic.” Genre in Iceland feels more like weather: changeable, layered, slightly unpredictable, but always somehow coherent. You dress in layers, so you listen in layers too.

What makes it all so affecting is the refusal to treat solitude as static. The music grows inside it. Moves within it. You don’t get the sense of someone stuck — you get the sense of someone rooted. I think that’s very different, as rootedness is active. It listens. It absorbs. It chooses to stay. Icelandic musicians don’t mine solitude for content. They let it shape the work, like snow moulding a roof, yet the end result isn’t cold. It’s exquisitely warm in that way only truly solitary things can be, like tea gone slightly too strong or socks slightly too big.

Perhaps that’s why these sounds resonate so strangely, so personally. They don’t arrive with fanfare or explanation, they drift into your life like weather, and you feel them without quite knowing where they came from or what they want. But when they land, they stay. Quiet, steady, companionable. Not speaking for you, not speaking to you. Just sitting beside you, waiting.  

Emotion: The Unornamented Heart

There’s something about Icelandic music that refuses sentimentality but still feels devastatingly emotional. It does something peculiar with emotion, it strips it not of its power, but of its posing. No mascara-streaked breakdowns. No grand orchestral stabs timed to make your heart swell like a Pavlovian experiment. Just emotion, raw and undecorated, left to hum quietly in the background like a radiator you didn’t realise was warm until you stepped too close.

It’s not cold. Quite the opposite. But it’s emotionality without choreography. You’re not told what to feel. There’s no sonic hand-holding. Instead, the feeling arrives sideways — half-buried in the hum of a bowed string, the sigh of a reverb tail, a single vocal line stretched so thin it nearly disappears into itself. There’s something deeply moving about that kind of restraint. It doesn’t come begging. It simply waits. And when it does open up, it’s like someone who hasn’t cried in years finally letting go not loudly, but completely.

Jóhann Jóhannsson was a master of this. He knew how to make music that mourned without drama. Listen to Fordlândia or The Miners’ Hymns and you’ll hear grief treated with the kind of seriousness most people reserve for religion. His compositions ache in slow motion, like landscapes folding inward. The melodies endure, and maybe you’ll cry because it reminds you that you’ve been carrying something heavy for too long, and you didn’t even notice until it spoke to you in your own quiet language.

Then there’s Björk, who manages to be both volcanic and surgical in her emotional expression. She doesn’t sing her pain, she vivisects it. Her voice is its own kind of scalpel, slicing through the flesh of experience to reveal the wet, quivering thing underneath. On Vulnicura, she turned heartbreak into anatomy. Not metaphorical anatomy — actual wounds, bleeding time signatures, scabbed-over vocal loops. And somehow, it never felt gratuitous. There was always a level of control there, a refusal to perform victimhood. Björk’s emotional palette isn’t limited to sadness or rage. There’s wonder. Spite. Deep erotic weirdness. All held together by that voice, part alien, part auntie. Fierce but never false.

On the other hand, Sigur Rós take a more abstract route, as if emotion were a weather system and their job was simply to build the right sort of clouds. There are entire songs where nothing really “happens,” and yet by the end you feel like you've been held and gently wrung out. Their music doesn’t so much tell a story as it leaves a trace, like a fingerprint on a fogged mirror. You wipe it away and then spend the rest of the week thinking about whose it was.

What I admire most is the refusal to over-explain. So much modern pop seems terrified that you won’t ‘Get It’ unless the chorus spells it out in bold. Icelandic music assumes you’re capable of feeling. It gives you the emotional seed and trusts you to water it yourself. Sometimes it grows into something you didn’t expect — a memory you didn’t know you missed, or a sadness that has no obvious source. Other times it doesn’t grow at all. And that’s fine too. The music offers presence, not persuasion.

There’s a humility in that, I think. A quiet confidence that the heart will recognise itself if given the chance. The best songs feel like they were written with the door slightly ajar, not to be coy, but because it’s impolite to assume everyone wants to come in. The listener is invited, not summoned.

That restraint, so often mistaken for coolness or detachment, is where the real emotional generosity lies. It’s easy to pour everything out. Much harder to offer just enough. Like someone passing you a handwritten note across the table. Not a declaration. Just a line. Just enough. And you read it and somehow it’s about you, even though it isn’t.

What’s left, then, is not emotional manipulation, but emotional architecture. Carefully built rooms, each with their own acoustics. Some echo more than others. Some make you feel tall. Others make you feel like you’re underwater, watching your own feelings drift by like fish. But none of them are empty.

And when you leave, the music doesn’t vanish. It lingers. It hovers in your chest, that soft pressure behind the ribs. Like remembering the smell of someone’s coat long after they’ve left the room. You don’t know why you’re thinking about it now. Only that it meant something.

Continuum: Echoes Beyond the Island

The Icelandic sound doesn’t end at Keflavík. It drifts, quietly but insistently, across oceans and borders like weather. You hear it stitched into the melancholy of Scandi-noir scores, where synths glow like distant headlights through fog. It crops up in Japanese post-rock too, in those slow-building instrumentals that stretch time until it forgets itself. Even American ambient pop occasionally hums with a borrowed frost, that half-remembered ache you can’t quite place, like deja vu wearing mittens.

But none of these echoes dilute the source. If anything, they underscore it. Icelandic music doesn’t behave like a trend, or even a genre — it behaves like memory. You feel it before you identify it. That low, glacial pulse, the way a chord progression seems less written than unearthed. It sounds like it’s already been here a while, quietly waiting for you to notice.

The island holds the original tension. It’s tectonic. Volcanic, but cold. Music made where fire sleeps under ice. You can hear the suspension in it, the waiting. That quiet dread that something beneath the surface might shift, suddenly and without warning. The melodies don’t resolve so much as hover, like steam rising from ground that should be frozen. It’s music born from living at the edge of something enormous, something ancient and unbothered by you.

What makes it mythic isn’t just the folklore, although that certainly helps. It’s the way it bypasses genre entirely. You could call it post-rock, ambient, experimental, electronic, modern classical… and you’d still miss the point. The myth lies in its time signature. It doesn’t tick, it breathes. Slowly. Like something sleeping inside a mountain.

You recognise it not by its sound, but by the weather it brings with it. A chill in the gut. A widening in the chest. A flicker of something older than language. And every time I hear it, I’m pulled back to that trip — standing alone by a lava field outside Húsavík, wind pressing against my coat, the sky turning violet. I’ll never forget it. Not because it was beautiful, though (of course) it was. But because it felt like the land and the music were in on something I wasn’t. And for once, I didn’t mind being left out.

S xoxo

Written in London, England

23rd April 2025