Ágætis byrjun by Sigur Ros

Ágætis byrjun, Icelandic for "a good beginning", was Sigur Rós's second album, released on 12 June 1999 after sessions with producer Ken Thomas that ran from the summer of 1998 into the following spring. It is a long way from the drifting ambient haze of Von. Jónsi Birgisson drags a cello bow across his guitar strings, a double string octet swells behind him, and his falsetto floats over the top, until the whole thing sounds less like a rock record than a glacier slowly cracking open.

It was the first album with Kjartan Sveinsson on keyboards and the last with drummer Ágúst Ævar Gunnarsson, who left a few months after it came out and was replaced by Orri Páll Dýrason. It sold 10,000 copies in its first year at home, enough for platinum in Iceland, reached Britain in 2000 and America in 2001, and turned into the band's critical and commercial breakthrough, "Svefn G Englar" and all.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.