Sigur Rós announce new orchestral album, Odin’s Raven Magic

Sigur Rós have announced a new orchestral album. On December 4, the Icelandic band will release Odin’s Raven Magic via Krunk/Warner Classics. The new album features the Schola Cantorum of Reykjavik and L’Orchestre des Laureats du Conservatoire national de Paris, and is a full-length collaboration with legendary Icelandic musician Hilmar Örn Hilmarsson and chanter/fisherman Steindór Andersen. The first single from the album is titled “Dvergmál.” Hear it below.

The album is inspired in part by a chapter in the Edda, a piece of historical literary tradition in Iceland. Hilmarsson discusses an aspect of it in a press release: “Hrafnagaldur Óðins has lots of interpretation and implications that fire up the imagination… It’s a very visual poem, with images all about falling down, and a world freezing from north to south. It was an apocalyptic warning. Perhaps the people of the time felt it in their skins. Today, of course, Iceland is involved in environmental issues surrounding hydro-electric power and the destruction of the highlands. We are being warned again.”