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Iceland

Ritual rock, born in a museum

Dead Skeletons

Dead Skeletons grew out of a sound installation that artist Jón Sæmundur Auðarson built for the Reykjavík Art Museum. He and Henrik Björnsson, who is also the frontman of Singapore Sling, turned it into a full band once they realized the droning, mantra-like material worked as live music. Their 2011 debut, Dead Magick, leaned on ritual as much as rock, with shows built around repetition and quasi-ceremonial staging, closer to a happening than a concert.

Hushed vocals, glitching laptops

múm

múm formed in Reykjavík in 1997 around Gunnar Örn Tynes and Örvar Þóreyjarson Smárason, who brought in twin sisters Gyða and Kristín Anna Valtýsdóttir after meeting them through a children's theatre production. That's an unlikely start for a band whose sound came from glitchy laptop electronics softened by acoustic instruments and Kristín Anna's hushed, almost whispered vocals. Gyða left not long after 2002's Finally We Are No One to study classical cello. It was one of several lineup changes, and none of them did much to the band's soft-focus sound.

Fuzz rock, named for a Greek film

Singapore Sling

Singapore Sling formed in Reykjavík in 2000 around Henrik Björnsson, a former bartender. Despite the name, the band took its cue from a 1990 Greek cult film, not the cocktail. The sound leans hard on the fuzzed, droning template of the Jesus and Mary Chain and Spacemen 3, walls of distorted guitar over deadpan vocals, and across eleven-plus albums for independent labels like Stinky and Fuzz Club they've barely deviated from it. Björnsson also co-founded Dead Skeletons, elsewhere on this page.

Hardcore drummer to BAFTA composer

Ólafur Arnalds

Ólafur Arnalds started out as a teenage drummer in Icelandic hardcore and metal bands. Then a commission to write string arrangements for a metal album pushed him toward composition for good. His 2007 debut, Eulogy for Evolution, released on the Berlin label Erased Tapes, set out the mix of minimalist piano and string writing with ambient electronics that he has stuck with ever since. That approach later carried him into film and television scoring, including a BAFTA-winning score for Broadchurch, which is a long way from the drum kit.

The Collection