The record begins with a click of distortion and ends with the same click, as if a door has been opened and closed on a world where songs do not need names. This is ( ), the third studio album by the Icelandic post-rock group Sigur Rós, released on October 28, 2002. It arrived with eight tracks, none of them titled, and a cover that showed only two opposing brackets cut into a plastic sleeve.
Songs that refused to be named
That absence was the point. The band had been playing the material live for more than two years, and the songs had grown so fully formed that adding lyrics felt wrong. Drummer Orri Páll Dýrason, who joined in 1999 and appears here for the first time, said it would have been strange to suddenly insert texts into finished pieces. So the group gave the tracks no official names, only listing them as Untitled #1 through Untitled #8, while privately using their own unofficial titles.
Even the singing refused to mean anything. Vocalist Jón Þór Birgisson, known as Jónsi, performs in Hopelandic, a made-up language of meaningless syllables. On ( ) the entire vocal part is built from one eleven-syllable phrase, rearranged and varied across the album. The band members call the record Svigaplatan, which translates as "The Bracket Album," and the film Heima credits it as The Untitled Album.
Two halves and thirty-six seconds
The structure is equally deliberate. The eight pieces split into two halves: the first four lighter and more optimistic, the last four darker and more melancholy. Between them sit thirty-six seconds of pure silence. The packaging reinforced the idea of two halves or no title at all: a plastic protective sleeve with two cut-out brackets through which the CD cover was visible, and a booklet of twelve empty pages left for listeners to fill with their own interpretations. The silence between the halves is not the only deliberate gap. The album's packaging also included a booklet of twelve empty pages, leaving room for listeners to create their own meanings.
This was also a shift in sound. Jónsi described ( ) as less polished than the previous album Ágætis byrjun, calling it more "naked and alive" with fewer sweet elements. The group had more time for production and recording this time, working at their own studio in Mosfellsbær, which they call Sundlaugin, meaning "the pool." Co-producer and engineer Ken Thomas returned from Ágætis byrjun, and the string quartet Amiina played a central role. The extra time was especially noticeable in the string arrangements. While the strings for Ágætis byrjun were recorded in two days with the Icelandic Symphony Orchestra, the strings on ( ) took two weeks with Amiina.
Chart success and critical reception
The album could have stayed a strange, hermetic experiment. Instead it reached number 51 on the Billboard 200 and earned an average Metacritic score of 82 out of 100 from twenty reviews. Critics placed it high on year-end lists, with Pitchfork ranking it twenty-ninth among the best albums of 2002. A record with no song titles, no real language, and a cover of two brackets had crossed over. The album's influence continued to grow in later years. In 2014, composer Ethan Hayden published a book about ( ) in the 33⅓ series, which Pitchfork later named one of the best books in that series.
The music also slipped into other media. Tracks from ( ) appeared in film trailers and soundtracks, including Untitled #4, which appeared in Vanilla Sky alongside two songs from Ágætis byrjun. Jónsi allowed that first licensing partly because he found the idea of Tom Cruise acting to their music amusing. Later, Untitled #8 turned up in the trailer for The Invasion in 2007, and Untitled #7 in a Dead Space video game trailer in 2008.
Twenty-four years on, the record still feels like a dare. It was released on FatCat Records and Bad Taste, produced by Sigur Rós and Ken Thomas, and recorded at Sundlaugin in Mosfellsbær, Iceland. It runs seventy-one minutes and forty-six seconds. It is described as post-rock, art rock, and ambient. But the truest description is the one the band chose: an album in brackets, a space left open for whatever the listener decides to put inside.