Iceland’s Sigur Rós return to once again prove that you don’t have to understand what the hell you’re hearing to fall in love with it. Their new album, Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust, is the band’s fifth full-length offering, and perhaps their most dynamic. The album opens with “Gobbledigook,” a tumbling tune that sounds an awful lot like Arcade Fire, and is followed by “Inní mér syngur vitleysingur” which both seem to foretell a more robust—almost glam-era Bowie—grandeur to come. As a whole, however, the album settles somewhere in between that and more of the same luminous Jónsi Birgisson’s falsetto-driven landscapes that Sigur Rós is famous for. Surrealistically seductive in its soundscape, Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust, concludes with “All Alright”, a piano-propelled track which is one of their most beautiful songs to date. It also happens to be the band’s first predominantly English track. In it Birgisson whispers, “Now he’ll know/What I’m telling.” Fitting perhaps in its irony, but whatever language they use—Icelandic, Hopelandic, and now, English—the message is universal.

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