Sigur Rós - “Brennisteinn”

Icelandic dream-rock heroes Sigur Rós released Valtari, their last album, less than a year ago, and they’ve already announced plans for the follow-up. Kveikur, out in a couple of months, is the band’s first album as a trio, now that multi-instrumentalist Kjartan Sveinsson has left the band. The new album will include a bunch of songs that the band has been playing live lately, and the members of the band have been calling the LP’s sound “more aggressive.”

That certainly applies to their latest eight-minute swoonathon “Brennisteinn,” which welds the band’s trademark falsetto swoops to a serious low-end churn. The band has just shared director Andrew Huang‘s video for the track, and it’s a cryptic, muddy epic allegory about something or other. Combined with the song’s prog-metal undercurrents, it’s enough to convince me that they’ve been spending some time with old Tool videos lately.