“Birthday” by The Sugarcubes

"Birthday" was the single that carried the Sugarcubes out of Iceland and into the wider world: released in 1987 as the Icelandic band's first international single, then tucked onto their 1988 debut album, Life's Too Good. An Icelandic-language version, "Ammæli", had come out at home the year before and rode along as the B-side.

It sounds like nothing else from its year. Sigtryggur Baldursson's drums pad around softly, Bragi Ólafsson's bass slinks, Þór Eldon's guitar picks out a queasy, glittering figure, and Einar Örn Benediktsson's trumpet wanders in like an uninvited guest. Over all of it Björk sings with a voice that coos, yelps and swoops from a whisper to a shriek, childlike and eerie at once. The band wrote it together, and Derek Birkett and Ray Shulman were among its producers.

British critics fell hard: Melody Maker and NME both made it their single of the week in August 1987, and the attention broke the band worldwide. It was their first UK chart entry, at 65, and reached number two on the indie chart. In America the Village Voice's Pazz & Jop poll put it at 15 for 1988, and that October they played it on Saturday Night Live alongside "Motorcrash".

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