Kveikur

Album: Kveikur (2013)
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Songfacts®:

  • This is the title track of Kveikur, the seventh studio album from Icelandic post-rock band Sigur Rós. The record name translates into English as 'Candlewick.' It was their first album to be fully released through XL after the band departed EMI and Parlophone and also the first record by the band as a trio, following the departure of keyboardist Kjartan Sveinsson in 2012.
  • Sigur Rós performed this on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. It was the band's first TV appearance in almost a decade. Asked by Digital Spy why they have avoided doing more television performances, bassist Georg Hólm explained. "We never really said no to playing TV shows before. The only reason why we have said no is because they've always asked us to play a six-minute song within three minutes.
    "With the new record, the songs are shorter," he continued, "So we can do it, we don't have to compromise anything. I'm sure we'll do some more."
  • Sigur Rós adopted a darker, more aggressive sound for the Kveikur album. Bassist Georg Hólm explained to The Line Of Best Fit why the band took a new direction for the record. "We don't normally have a set idea about how the writing process is going to progress, but with Kveikur, we actually did sit down and say, 'we should really try to make something completely different from anything we've ever done before,'" he said. "We didn't know exactly what that was going to be, but we thought that if we were going to make another record, we needed to step out of our comfort zone and push each other to do different things, and move in new directions. I think we felt that we needed to sort of force our interest in electronics down the routes we were interested in."

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