Plus: it’s quite clear that MUNA are going to be huge

What is it with Icelanders and mushrooms? Just weeks after Bjork releases a fungal-themed album, Fossora, Sigur Ros appear on stage with dozens of sporey lights illuminating the gloom.

It’s boom time for mycophiles, but with Sigur Ros the link makes a certain kind of sense. Their aesthetic is not so much post-rock as glacial. For almost three decades the Icelandic quartet have been making large-screen, epically elemental music: celestial choral pieces, art-house concert films, ambient soundscapes and the occasional relatively conventional rock and pop song. Whether aware of it or not, you will have heard ‘Hoppipolla’ on numerous BBC nature documentaries. We won’t hear it tonight, though. Instead, this long show encompasses all that is most entrancing and frustrating about the band. Having previously flirted with arenas, they’re back in theatres, with the forbidding demeanours of men determined to make us work for our pleasure.

The first set is, it’s fair to say, light on toe tappers. This is the music of drift, bloom and sway. The sound of great hunks of ice breaking off from their moorings, birds borne woozily on rising thermals. You either get carried along in the slipstream or remain unmoved. The pieces – ‘songs’ seems insufficiently grand – are built on clean, simple melodic motifs at which the musicians hammer away. Plink-plonk beginnings rise to chest-heaving swells. Singer and guitarist Jonsi Birgisson’s crystalline falsetto mixes Icelandic, English and his own ‘gobbledygook’ vocalese, Vonlenska, to create a sound like wind hitting wire. Occasionally the flow is blocked by mighty squalls and howls, the aural equivalent of heavy weather.

At its best, it’s a transportive rush. At its least effective, it’s all a little repetitive and predictable. The band stand behind their instruments, shuffling to and from work stations between songs. The mind wanders, not unappealingly, to those glowing mushrooms and abstract film footage (Sigur Ros make the kind of music that bestows instant gravitas on flickering Super 8 slo-mo visuals). When that palls, we get Jonsi sawing away at his guitar with an e-bow, or singing into his pick-up. There are echoes of the Cure and Radiohead at their most funereal on ‘Untitled #7 – Daudalagid’, the drums beating out a sorry lamentation.

Come the intermission no words have been spoken and few bones thrown our way. In the second set, the pace picks up. Driven by a lithe synth riff, ‘Sæglopur6’ is sharp and atmospheric. ‘Gong’ is dreamily propulsive pop, concise and direct. On these occasions, thrillingly, Sigur Ros sound like A-ha after undergoing an extensive rewilding process.

They end with ‘Untitled #8 – Popplagid’, a frenzied blizzard of sound and colour. Beforehand, Jonsi finally talks to the audience – in Icelandic. Pointedly contrary to the last, for an encore they return only to bow and clap. ‘Takk’ says the screen. We’ve all earned it.

Proceedings are more lively the following night, half a mile across town. MUNA are quite obviously going to be huge. A trio from Los Angeles promoting their third album, they’re signed to Phoebe Bridgers’ record label and supporting Taylor Swift on her stadium tour next year. For now, they are in that weird space of being a big deal in a small room, fulfilling bookings in venues they have already outgrown.

Musically, MUNA are match fit. They remind me of Madonna, Like a Virgin vintage: bright, hooky pop with a meaty rhythmic punch provided by live bass and drums – the latter slightly overpowering the sound tonight. And they are great fun. Lead singer and principal songwriter Katie Gavin does glam with a twist, headbanging and kung-fu kicking in a tiny black dress. Band mates Josette Maskin and Naomi McPherson exude knowingly dorky retro-cool. During ‘Anything But Me’, in deference to the equine slant of the opening lyrics, an inflatable miniature horse is thrown into the crowd and batted around.

They cover the Killers’ ‘Mr Brightside’ – a 2022 take on a millennial 1980s throwback; peel back those layers – but they needn’t have bothered. Songs such as ‘Runner’s High’ and the Haim-like ‘I Know A Place’ prove that they have enough high-calibre pop tunes of their own. The only odd moment is a minor identity crisis near the end. Gavin straps on an acoustic guitar for ‘Kind Of Girl’, a ruthlessly efficient mainstream country ballad that sounds as though it belongs to another band and a different show. It suggests that an alternative future awaits Gavin as a hit songwriter-for-hire; she could be the next Linda Perry or Diane Warren. Or she might decide that making sharp, joyous pop with MUNA is more rewarding.

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