Iceland Airwaves review: a bright new scene emerges in Reykjavík

Now in its 25^th year, Icelandic festival Iceland Airwaves has become a leader in the global calendar of showcase festivals alongside SXSW, The Great Escape and others. Across its musical programme and conference events, 2024’s edition paints a hopeful but complicated future for music both within and beyond the country’s borders.

Across the conference, topics ranged from maintaining artistic integrity in a capitalist society, marketing in a stan culture era, the life (or death) of the live music industry and more. On stage and in conversation, young Icelandic bands present exciting and boundary-pushing new music, though worry about the closure of local venues.

Though there is a healthy contingent of local bands on the line-up, most prominent slots at Iceland Airwaves are still taken up by foreign artists. Of these, rising acts from the UK impress most. London three-piece Mary in the Junkyard are fast becoming one of the most intriguing new acts on the circuit, and their Thursday night show in low-ceilinged rock bar Gaukurinn is a triumph defined by the snaking, Radiohead-like guitar lines of Clari Freeman-Taylor.

Less subtle but equally impactful are Mandy, Indiana and Wu-Lu, who play back-to-back in the larger Kolaport venue on Saturday. The former have a true star in vocalist Valentine Caulfield, who jumps into the crowd at every available opportunity to shout bewitching lyrics in French over slabs of industrial noise. Wu-Lu follow, hopping thrillingly from being a superb and crunchy alternative rock band to dropping their guitars and becoming a hair-raising rap troupe for a couple of songs. Both guises fit them extremely well and point to a limitless future for the London band.

Most exciting though is a glimpse into the next generation of Icelandic music. Thursday sees up-and-coming local band Supersport! play a charming set of scrappy but melodic guitar pop, recalling cult UK greats Los Campesinos! in its melodies and energy. Also impressing are Virgin Orchestra, who play a set of crunchy indie-rock peppered with beautiful blasts of cello early on Friday evening. The band includes a classically trained cellist and two students of electronic production, which gives a unique and thrilling slant to their guitar music.

Saturday, meanwhile, is defined by the absurd and superb Inspector Spacetime. The band – named after the Doctor Who spoof that Donald Glover and Danny Pudi’s characters watch in Community – are somewhat of an Icelandic Confidence Man, whipping up pure chaos with brash dance-pop songs and charmingly shabby stage outfits. Their half-hour blast of pure fun is a refuge from the biting wind and rain outside, and providing such a tonic was surely on their mind when creating such music.

Alongside this crop of new bands, the shadow and influence of the country’s most famous musical sons and daughters still looms large and puts this new wave into context. At the time of the festival, Sigur Rós frontman Jónsi hosts the immersive exhibition FLÓÐ (Flood) at the Reykjavík Art Museum, with flickering lights and ambient compositions based around the crisis of rising sea levels. Down the road, the band’s Sundlaugin studio – set in an old swimming pool – still thrives and supports local artists under the stewardship of founding band member Kjartan Sveinsson.

As a popular layover destination between Europe and the United States, Iceland has aimed to become a cultural hub to attract worldwide visitors. The country’s airline, Icelandair, also invest heavily in the festival and cultural scene. “There was a research paper released a couple of weeks ago that showed a £1 investment in the arts [in Iceland] gets £3 in the bank,” says Árni Hjörvar Árnason, bassist for The Vaccines and Manager of Marketing and Communication at Iceland Music. “There’s a triple on your investment in the Icelandic music scene, and that’s before the world-building and the image-shaping that culture has for such a small country.”

Despite this, worries persist about venue closures similar to the UK, with Virgin Orchestra already setting their sights on foreign lands. “There are good communities here, but venues are closing rapidly here,” guitarist Starri Holm tells us before their show on Friday. “We are lucky that we managed to establish ourselves before stuff started to shut down.”

To combat this, bands and artists have taken to hosting house shows and events in unusual spaces, with the more traditional music venues no longer around. Alongside the festival’s official programme, music can be heard pumping out of any manner of venues across the city over the weekend, from leading record stores 12 Tonar and Smekkleysa to the dingy rock bar Lemmy.

This lack of opportunities is a ceiling that Árnason recognises for Icelandic acts, but one that can also set them apart for when they spread their wings beyond the island. “There are limited possibilities. Even though they are more now than they were before, they are certainly more limited than they are in London for example,” he says. “People are able create in a much more free headspace. They don’t subscribe to specific agendas in order to appease a specific person.”

Musically, this new crop of bands aren’t tied together with too much sonic cohesion, but more of a creative and cultural ethos. Árnason, who works with a host of these young bands as an unofficial father figure, says that “structural factors” regarding the tiny size of the local music scene and the long Icelandic winters have forced the city’s creative community to be one of collaboration and experimentation. “It’s dark and cold here, and you have to be inside,” he says. “You might as well make noise with your friends.”