New sounds for your ears, spanning electro-alternative, pleasantly shambling indie and delicate neo-classical.
All these little beauties—and so many more brought to you by The Grapevine over the past twelve months—are available in our New Music Picks 2021-22 playlist.
Vök – “Lose Control”
More polished, accomplished alt-pop from this reliably consistent trio. Singer Margrét Rán says that this song started as a fantasy musing on her girlfriend, but took a darker turn when bassist Einar got involved, (probably to be expected given his other gig as the eternally masked Hatari gimp).
Certainly the video to “Lose Control”—a dizzying disorientation of alcoholic shot-slamming and blurred, melting, snogging faces—could depict someone losing control in a most unfortunate way. But the jaunty feel of the track remains true to its upbeat roots in Margrét Rán’s cosy fantasy—it even skanks a little in places!—and you get the feeling that everything was OK in the end.
Supersport! – “Taka Samtalið”
Charmingly ramshackle indie which grows on you quickly with a couple of listens. And comes across a bit like Belle and Sebastian covering a Pavement song in Icelandic, if you want some slightly fatuous cultural reference points, (and I’m afraid that journalists are rather fond of slightly fatuous cultural reference points).
But Supersport! (the exclamation point is theirs, not mine), are probably already familiar to many musically-inclined Reykvíkingurs, having been around for a while now with an album out last year and an association with the very worthy Post Dreifing collective. They managed to get onto national Icelandic TV recently, and played the track on Gísla Marteini’s show, which you can watch here. Performing properly live—no miming nonsense!—they modelled a fetching white football strip which I presume will be available from their merch table at upcoming gigs.
Eydís Evensen- “The Light I”
This first track from Eydís Evensen’s forthcoming four-track EP ‘Frost’, due next month, is a gorgeous gentle piano piece which conveys the emerging joy of waking from the darkest season into spring. In fact, all four tracks of the EP take the long, harsh northern winters as their inspiration, continuing the tradition that Eydís established for herself as a child when she started composing pieces influenced by Icelandic nature.
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