( )
- Zone: Shallows (level 2 of 5)
- Genre: Rock, Post-rock, Ambient
- Mood: somber, vast, hushed
- Sound: untitled songs, invented-language vocals, bowed guitar, slow builds, long songs, falsetto vocals
( ) has no title, no named songs and no lyrics in a real language. Jónsi sings the whole album in Hopelandic (Vonlenska), a made-up language of meaningless syllables, and all eight tracks are officially untitled. The band built it from slow, swelling guitar, bowed guitar, keyboards and strings from the quartet Amiina, with a lighter first half and a more melancholic second half separated by 36 seconds of silence, like the two sides of a record. It was the first album recorded in the band’s own studio at Álafoss and has no liner notes or credits, only a plastic sleeve with the parentheses cut out and twelve blank pages for listeners to fill in. It treats the voice as an instrument, and it pushed post-rock further towards wordless, ambient music.
Track list
- Untitled (“Vaka”)
- Untitled (“Fyrsta”)
- Untitled (“Samskeyti”)
- Untitled (“Njósnavélin”)
- Untitled (“Álafoss”)
- Untitled (“E-Bow”)
- Untitled (“Dauðalagið”)
- Untitled (“Popplagið”)