Iceland’s music scene is erupting, and the world should listen

It’s Saturday evening in Reykjavík, on the final day of Iceland Airwaves festival, and a couple hundred people are gathered in the Fríkirkjan Lutheran free church, set on the Tjörnin lake’s edge. They sit in hushed silence along forward-facing pews, while others lean over from the upper storey to get a glimpse of a seated RAKEL – backed by a band that features a bassist, a pianist, a trumpeter and a flautist holding a giant baritone flute that’s taller in height than its musician – who gently strums her acoustic guitar to ​‘always’, the opener to her new album a place to be.

From its delicate start, the track builds and builds, climaxing as her backing singer yells ​“always!” as she hits the chorus: ​“Slowly, slowly drown / And I follow you down / Because I’m always bound / So you’re always around,” filling the church hall with sound. RAKEL has been on the lips of many of Reykjavík’s in-the-know heads all weekend, following the album’s release via OPIA Community – a grassroots collective founded by Icelandic modern-classical composer and multi-instrumentalist Ólafur Arnalds, and she gets a standing ovation as she walks off the stage.

Wild, then, to realise that the performance is only her second ever with the full band, just two days after their first. ​“It was a beautiful experience – I felt really good in that concert,” she says afterwards. ​“It was just our second concert playing together. The one on Thursday [at fellow festival venue Iðnó] was our first.”

The performance tops off a huge weekend for her. Beyond those two festival slots and making multiple cameos at other off-venue events, she also took home the IA25 Plus Award. Given each year to an artist that who is deemed ready to take on the international music scene, it comes with a 500,000 ISK (£3,000) grant, as well as 2026 slots at partner festivals FOCUS Wales and New Colossus in New York.

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The success is payoff for years spent grinding away within Reykjavík’s music scene. ​“My career has mostly been sessioning for other artists, and I’ve played Iceland Airwaves every year since 2015 as a backing artist,” RAKEL says. ​“So it’s nice to get recognition and I’m really thankful for it.”

Fulfilling the IA25 Plus Award’s stated intentions would make RAKEL the next act up from Iceland’s packed conveyer belt of musicians who have broken across the Atlantic Ocean. Sitting neatly in between Europe and the USA, Iceland has seen several artists make the leap across the water, spanning genres and styles, but always artful and avant-garde. Björk, of course, continues to be Iceland’s standard bearer, as well as a pioneer of the experimental electronics across the world, while Sigur Rós and múm have exported their own unique takes on cinematic post-rock, alt-rock and indietronica. The country’s metal scene is one of the world’s most respected, and most recently, jazz-pop-classical mixologist Laufey’s third album A Matter Of Time has been one of 2025’s albums of the year.

By approximation, there are only 400,000 people in the whole of Iceland. For context, that’s roughly the population of Croydon in London, or Lower Manhattan in New York. It’s such a small country, that there is a website, Íslendingabók (The Book of Icelanders), which traces the population’s genealogy back centuries, which some use to check whether they are related to potential prospective partners. 

Given that a few decades ago, it was largely disconnected from much of the world and seen mostly as a remote fishing island, it’s a scarcely believable musical prolificacy. But during the three days when Iceland Airwaves takes over Reykjavík, the picture starts to gain clarity. Across its eight downtown venues, there are over 100 artists performing, and with doors opening at around 6:30pm each evening and running until the early hours, it’s lightning-paced, chaotic and jam packed full of music. Nowadays, the country’s creative industries make up around 3.5% of its GDP per capita – just below the 4% contributed by fishing.

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The line-up is a diverse melting pot, and a carefully selected scene risers from abroad, such as Manchester’s Anthony Szmiriek, whose spoken word delivered over clubby 2‑step beats translated naturally to the expansive hall of Reykjavík’s Art Museum, along with Saya Grey from Toronto, who blended poppy electronic grooves with attitude-packed grungy riffs on her double-necked guitar. Irish provocateurs Bricknasty also featured, and there was even a late night Saturday appearance from UK rap underground hero Jeshi.

A particular highlight, though, comes from Mexican songstress Silvana Estrada, who backed by a string quartet and armed with a cuatro – a four stringed instrument that sits somewhere between a guitar and a ukulele – has a significant section of the crowd shedding tears. Even though she exclusively sings in Spanish, she details the grief of losing her best friend that inspired her new album, and her empyrean vocals do the rest. 

But across the weekend, what shines brightest is the array of local talents. On the line-up, artists are presented in alphabetical order, with no extra bells and whistles for imports, while Icelandic acts are trusted with some of the weekend’s biggest slots. Thursday’s highlights feature experimental techno-pop from lúpina, glitching IDM from electronic producer knackered, and a haunting set from local icon Ólöf Arnalds featuring just an acoustic guitar and a microphone.

Friday night sees a late-night set of psychedelic, rattling shoegaze from Spacestation in Kolaport – a usual flea market moonlighting as a venue for the weekend – and a pop set from Eurovision finalist MAIAA, who has half of the crowd in Bird, a local bar, chanting her name by the end of her set. On top of RAKEL’s church performance, Saturday night also sees Alaska1867’s hazy autotuned cloud rap and R&B.

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Such mixture between Icelandic and foreign artists is by design, explains Ísi Þórhallsson, Festival Director of Iceland Airwaves. ​“It’s like equal billing. We’re intentionally open to anything,” he says. ​“It just has to be fresh, new and exciting, and they have to have a voice and something to say.” 

Founded 26 years ago by the country’s national airline Icelandair as a tool to try and attract tourists to the remote island, the festival grew from scrappy beginnings into a supersized phenomenon, in parallel with a tourism boom to the country that has seen a record 1.8 million visitors in the first nine months of 2025. Ultimately, control and direction of the festival was handed over to Ísi and his Sena Live team in 2018, who had by then established themselves as Iceland’s biggest live event promoters. 

Cutting back in scale to put stronger emphasis on new music and its underground spirit, it was important for the new team to keep its founding principles alive. ​“Iceland Airwaves would be nothing without Icelandic music – it is completely intertwined,” Ísi continues. ​“We have had so many bands break through from this tiny population, it’s kind of strange, and one thing is definitely having Iceland Airwaves as a platform. You get the attention of the industry and press once a year; do a good job, and things can happen.”

At a gathering of staff, volunteers, guests and industry heads to kick off the festival on Thursday, the mayor of Reykjavík, Heiða Björg Hilmisdóttir, gives a speech, in which she declares the Icelandic capital as ​“a music city”. Walking around town, it’s easy to hear why. Beyond the six venues that are situated in the downtown area, live performances and carefully curated playlists leak out of Reykjavík’s bars, record stores, nightclubs, coffee shops, living rooms, restaurants and even hairdressers. 

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Other concerts appear in off-festival venues, including a rehearsal-turned-impromptu live performance from múm in Mengi; an intimate space opened by Ólöf Arnalds and her partner, composer and guitarist Skúli Sverrisson in 2013. Ólöf, having toured with múm in the mid-2000s before embarking upon her own solo career, had previously focused most of her energies towards having her music heard and sold abroad, in the music industry’s traditional centres of power.

“We just felt that there was a need for this size of venue in Reykjavík. 60 people capacity, very intimate,” Arnalds says. ​“Both for established artists to go out of their comfort zone and do something they’re not used to doing, and also for young and upcoming artists trying out their material for the first time.”

It’s the longest running independent music venue in the capital, and being such a small venue in a city of expensive property – the average rent for a one bedroom apartment ranges from 200,000 ISK (£1,200) to 300,000 ISK (£1,800) – its margins will always be tight. But it’s also a way for Arnalds to give back to her city and its music community, and provide a space in the Icelandic music industry where the creativity is blossomming, but infrastructure – namely record labels, A&Rs, management companies, etc. – is thin on the ground. 

Over its decade-plus of existing, Mengi has become a key space for experimentation – often compared to east London’s Café OTO, as well as an important local building block for music within the country. ​“There’s so much focus on exports, and whether an artist is export-ready. That’s great, but what are you going to export if no one has any facilities?” she continues. ​“I wanted to nurture my roots and the local scene – I had toured so much and wasn’t necessarily seeing that much comfort.”

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In Icelandic, there’s a word called Sköpunargleðin. It’s not easily translatable to English, especially within the confines of a single word, but gleði can be interchanged with ​‘joy’, while sköpu roughly means ​‘creation’. Sköpunargleðin: The Storm-Soaked Joy of Making Things is the topic of a panel discussion on Thursday afternoon at the Iceland Airwaves Conference – a quieter, calmer affair than the evening slate of gig hopping, where beers and liquorice shots are swapped for tea and coffee. 

Hosted by journalist Charis McGowan, the panel features Icelandic pop legend Páll Óskar, visual artist and local perfumery Fischersund co-founder Lilja Birgisdóttir, journalist Jóhannes Bjarki Bjarkason and performing artist Ísadóra Bjarkardóttir Barney aka Doa, who happens to be Björk’s daughter (her mother was sitting in the audience). During the hour long conversation, some compare the word to finding a flow state when creating something, whether it’s cooking up a dish in the kitchen, painting, taking a photograph, or a writing a new song. Others see it as a more of an expression of channelling creativity with zero strings attached, simply for the fun of it. Ultimately, it captures a feeling that shines particularly brightly on the island.

Árni Hjövar, Manager of Marketing and Communication at Iceland Music, as well as another of the country’s musical exports as the bassist of 2010s indie sensations The Vaccines, lands on the latter side and believes it goes some way to explaining the success of their music and wider arts scene. ​“It certainly feels like our creative output is broadly appreciated on an international level,” he says. ​“It’s always been difficult to pinpoint what that is, but I think one of the driving factors is because due to the limited opportunities available to musicians in Iceland, it feels like commercial ambition is not a driving force behind any decision, and it means that there’s a freer expression. You’re not trying to pitch yourself very early on, you’re just trying to pass time.”

In Iceland – set far north on the world map, just below the Arctic Circle – time moves differently to most places where humans have settled. Iceland Airwaves marks the last event of the year before winter truly takes hold, when seemingly eternal darkness envelops the island, and ice blankets its land. In June, between 20 and 22 hours of sunlight are experienced a day, and switching off to sleep becomes difficult. 

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For many Icelanders, getting through long days and long nights requires finding ways of occupying themselves. ​“It shapes the entire country,” Hjövar says. ​“Things slow down dramatically when you’ve got these darker periods, and when it gets light again you get this burst of activity that goes way beyond what should be reasonable of a small population. So it affects creativity; for a large period of the year, activities mostly take place indoors, so it’s a more viable place to have intense training on music or computer science, or things generally associated with being inside.”

These are ripe conditions for experimentation, which has perhaps been the strongest thread that has unified Iceland’s music since the early ​’80s, when an avant-garde, anti-establishment punk scene began to emerge in the 1981 – 1982 winter.  Featuring the likes of Þeyr, Purrkur Pillnikk and Tappi Tíkarrass – led by then 16-year-old Björk – the era is immortalised in The Icelandic Punk Museum, set downtown in Reykjavík, as well as in legendary documentary Rokk í Reykjavík. 

Watching it in the present day, what stands out is just how unorthodox and innovative it all is – bands playing impromptu gigs in public plazas to bewildered onlookers, or vocalists bending their nostrils to layer natural effects onto their singing voices. ​“They were the first people that started the first label that had any sort of international interest,” Hjörvar explains. ​“It was basically just a handful of students at the same college, and they influenced everything that came after it.”

Over four decades later, that spirit – of people getting together and experimenting – remains, and drives the creativity coming out of the once remote island. From Ólöf Arnalds founding Mengi with Sverrisson, to Ólafur Arnalds’ OPIA Community, there’s a tangible feeling of collectivism; of time, resources and creativity shared.

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Part of that comes from everyone knowing each other. A small population means an even smaller music community. ​“In order to have more than a handful of bands going, you have to rely on the same people across all of them – everybody’s involved in five or six different things,” Hjörvar says. ​“It means you get this huge influence from all of these different places.

“It’s very visible in the metal scene,” he continues. ​“Metal sub-genres are very unique, so when you go to a metal festival you’re either a death metal or speed metal fan, but rarely a crossover of those things. And in the Icelandic metal scene it’s not that, because in order to have a speed metal band, you also need the singer from a hardcore band to join it, because the scene is so small – it means the sound amalgamates all these things and creates something new.”

And at Iceland Airwaves – the most important music week of the year in Reykjavík – this collaborative spirit shines through. Fresh off the back of her IA25 Plus Award, RAKEL has the seedlings of her latest joint project. ​“I just met lúpina, who has just moved home from Norway,” she says. ​“We just went for coffee, and now we’re going to meet for our first studio session in December and do something. It’s that easy, and it’s so easy and fun. I can meet up with someone who’s doing weird electronic stuff and work with them, and I feel very inspired by that.”

Isaac Muk is Huck’s digital editor. Follow him on Bluesky.

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