Mannfólkið breytist í slím takes over Akureyri, Iceland’s “capital of the north,” for three days of underground music. At its core is a scene resisting definition, and a country grappling with ownership and access in the arts. Archie Fjörd reports.
APPROX 10,000 FT OVER AKUREYRI, NORTH ICELAND
My propeller plane lurches past barren desert, shuddering like it can feel the cold. I am heading towards the Arctic Circle, after all. I shoot over the mouth of Eyjafjörður, Iceland’s longest fjord. My destination is Iceland’s second city, Akureyri, known for freezing temps, a hardy local population (just over 20,000), and swaths of old fishing warehouses. Maybe also Iceland’s first self-sufficient music scene outside of Reykjavik.
Iceland’s geography means there’s significant disparities in its music culture. The country’s underground has long been a patchwork of punks and elusive upstarts whose fanbases way exceed Iceland’s small population. There’s The Sugarcubes and their offspring Björk, as well as Sigur Ros, but also bubblegum trap queen Alvia Islandia, electro-shocked doomers MC MYASNOI, dreamy glitch-popper lúpína, slinky screamo boy/girl band Skelkur í bringu, and Spider Network noise collective.
Reykjavik has far superior infrastructure to Akureyri, and 60% of Iceland’s 400,000 population. Legend has it that the city was the island’s first permanent settlement, circa 870AD, and its location was discovered through a traditional Norse method: when land was in sight, sailors would cast high seat pillars overboard and settle where the gods decided to bring them ashore. If you’re an Icelandic musician, you follow the gods and the pillars to Reykjavik – and usually stay there.
AKUREYRI
I cruise into town via a wide boulevard, before turning into quaint streets. Alpine tourists speckle around. In the reception of my hostel, taxidermied deer are bolted to wood-pannelled walls and people wear their coats inside although it is July. Walking around later that night, I see kids on pedal bikes causing mischief in strip malls, idle trucks in overgrown front yards, and glum playparks, all of which sit incongruously against the mountains that hug Akureyri from every direction but north.
As any kid with a basement worth their salt will tell you, small towns can be crucibles for the best kind of experimental music. Jón Haukur Unnarsson and Ingi Jóhann Friðjónsson founded Mannfólkið breytist í slím (MBS) 16 years ago, with friend Aldís Dagmar Erlingsdóttir stepping in as artistic director later down the line. This record label, then a festival from 2018, has long put up some of the best Icelandic fringe music and art over the course of three days. It’s the largest undertaking of its kind outside the capital – Bjork reportedly pulled up last year with a nonchalant entourage.
DIPPING MY TOE IN THE SLIME, PRIMORDIALLY
I met Unnarsson and the MBS team on a slightly grey day at the Slime Station (MBS loosely translates to “Humankind Turns to Slime”; an overarching slime theme seeps into everything). Once the festival’s early home, it doubles as a free space for local bands who can’t practice elsewhere, and is located in Akureyri’s warehouse district, which used to contain a thriving fishing industry.
Unnarsson is never referred to as Jón, only Jón Haukur, as if the two names have a holy inseparability. He has the vibe of an eccentric music soothsayer type, tucking long brown hair behind his ears and getting excited when he talks about MBS. Ingi, fellow founder, has the same long hair and warmth as Jón Hakur; Aldís, artistic director, is kooky and animated, with a short blonde bob and glasses. The trio grew up in Akureyri together.
Ingi tells me the inspiration for MBS came when he and Jón Hakur hit 17, and were playing in doom metal bands. Iceland is small, he says, but outside of Reykjavik, your world is even smaller: “There was like one doom band in the whole of Iceland at the time and it was in Reykjavik.”
Playing in Reykjavik for the first time was a wild experience, but made the disparity between Akureyri and the capital even clearer. There was the option to move to Reykjavik and pursue music, but they stayed. According to Jón Hakur, it was and still is rare for local music festivals to skew experimental, and to book young, weird musicians trying to develop their sound. “MBS is a form of cultural activism to combat the pop-ridden town festivals we grew up with in Akureyri,” Jón Hakur says. “Even smaller places have had cool independent festivals—why not Akureyri?” Jón Hakur strives to keep the festival free because he wants MBS to “enhance the cultural ecosystem in North Iceland” amid so many resources going to the capital area.
Since 2010, MBS has snowballed into a massive undertaking. The venue changes every year, but 2026’s edition is in an old, slightly Lynchian car workshop overlooking an industrial port.
Before we can see the venue, we follow Jón Hakur and co. out of Akureyri to the fjörd. I’m driven by the musician Arnar Ari, who sports an oversized moustache and faded dungarees. We chat about the availability of MDMA in Iceland, which used to be better but is dwindling slightly, before he offers up some fish jerky—great beer snack, best enjoyed in small doses.
Arnar tells me how he and the rest of the MBS team have been repurposing an old warehouse for the last sixteen days, taking time off their day jobs to do so. “None of this would be possible without the help of the local community; that is our bread and butter,” Aldís agrees, leading me through a maze of pallets in a makeshift outside area, pushing up her glasses as we speak.
Her job as art director involves making spaces that are otherwise unfit for a music festival work. To keep out the midnight sun, windows are covered with bedsheets and textiles borrowed from a local Red Cross. The imagery is trippy and dippy—massive posters with an amorphous blob of slime are everywhere, with several sets of eyes that follow your every move; a wooden totem pole with a frog’s head carved into it sits onstage like a guard. Outside, a bar staffed by figures dressed as clowns offers Icelandic moonshine, which is apparently fermented with human yeast. Would go well with fish jerky.
The crowd is a kind of accidental mishmash of scenes: I watch a burly man, who’s a bassist in a band playing later and who sports a respectable beard and a t-shirt with Laura Palmer on that says “SHE MY TRAP QUEEN,” talk to a woman with grey hair in work attire.
The bill offers the same flavor-meld. The first day, Thursday, is headlined by a Columbian cumbia artist called Conjunto Media Luna, a Greek electronic musician who self-exiled to Iceland to write about its landscape named Venus Volcanism, and a b2b set from Icelandic skate rats turned Berlin industrial techno DJs Volruptus + In3dee. The best music caught me way off guard. Skelkur í bringu, a no-wavey punk trio with slurred guitars and femme screams, were always one syllable away from collapse.
One of Thursday’s highlights was teenage Akureyrian metallers Basilik, who snapped the groggy-looking crowd awake. Their sound befits their name – biting, downtuned guitars in the vein of Neurosis, Sleep, and Boris, but punkish vocals and studied defiance that calls to mind ‘90s screamo acts like Helmet, Quicksand, and Drive Like Jehu. Despite the gig at MBS being one of their first, a Basilisk guitarist rocks up late in True Religion jeans and Adidas slides.
QUICK PITSTOP: WHAT IS THE DEAL WITH ICELANDIC METAL?
The band’s first single, “Cottonmouth,” erupts with pentatonic solos and collective builds that capture the feel of jamming with friends after school. In the foyer of my hotel, Basilisk told me they named the song not because they’re stoners. They just really like snakes.
Metal has a long history in Iceland, I like to think partly because of the country’s harsh terrain – big mountains, vacant deserts, limitless valleys. The band is the latest in a new bloodline of Akureyrian metal groups: SOT, who performed last year at MBS, are now representing Iceland at Wacken Metal Fest, the world’s biggest metal competition.
“SOT passed the torch,” frontman Adam Joseph says. Originally born in Atlanta, Adam moved after his mom divorced her husband. They’re all 17 or 18: Adam is growing in stubble and rocks an SOT tee and vans. The other members include bassist Julius, drummer Benny, and Olaf and Kari on guitar. The group aren’t all from Akureyri – Benny says there aren’t even paved roads where he lives; Adam lives in a village – and they met through the internet.
Olaf, the most confident of the group, tells me that their small-town backgrounds are a strength. “It’s cool. Like, we can say we’re from Akureyri. We’re not from Reykjavik. It gives us personality.” Still, producing music is a challenge: “There’s like, three people who can mix and produce music effectively [here].” While they spent rehearsals between their garage and the Slime Station, Basilisk had to tap another Akureyrian musician, Drengurinn Fengurinn, who has a studio, to record their single. Other musicians aren’t so lucky, which makes spaces like Jón Hakur’s invaluable.
I’m for Akureyrian pride — but the Reykjavik acts also happened to feel like the most fully formed. CYBER, a Reykjavik pop group whose huge following overpowers MBS’ converted warehouse, are Iceland’s answer to The Femcels.
The best act from the capital is Spider Network noise collective, who are playing in support of their member Ronja. Ronja recently played at Bjork’s Solar Eclipse rave, and is part of a new scene of Icelandic teens and twentysomethings using noise music to combat venue closures and loss of community to tourism in Reykjavik. I say part of a scene: Iceland’s small size means Spider Network basically are the scene.
SPIDER NETWORK’S NOISE WAR
I caught up with the collective on Saturday afternoon, just before their headline set. We sit on old deck chairs and pass around a broken Fisher Price toy microphone to record the conversation.
Spider Network’s way of life is hijinks. After an insightful conversation about politics, music, identity, and Iceland, I ask what keeps them optimistic about making music in their country. Ronja replies, a unanimous giggle from Spider Network indicating her answer is gospel: “What keeps me optimistic? Being as evil as possible.”
Their shows revel in the freedom of noise—they do bring-your-kid harsh noise conventions, Hanatarash-style (a big influence) interactive fight nights, contact mic’d bouncing basketballs, and even a one-off, girl-organised, independent noise festival, only made to piss off another group in Reykjavik trying to do a similar thing.
“Yes, the Noise War. That’s what they call it,” says hat-wearing Yulia Vasileva, her blue hair catching the evening sun. “There was another noise festival happening in Reykjavik at the same time that was called Reykjavik Noise Festival, which is explicitly stating what it is, because our festival is not implying what genre of music it is. So we kind of cheekily got, like, pissed off, and said: ‘Okay, we’re gonna make another noise festival at the same time and make it one day longer.’”
Yulia is the joker of the group. Other members include Yuki, a journalist and composer from The Netherlands who is covering the trip for The Reykjavik Grapevine; Ronja; and Fía, who just dropped out of university in Berlin to get to Iceland.
Yulia’s noise origin story is part accident, part punk: “I was inspired by the lack of making music involved in the music,” she laughs. “So I just gave in and was making noise. And then I learned that it’s a genre. People actually love it. We started making it and I thought: Finally, I don’t have to try my best anymore. I can just be myself.”
Making noise was also a satirization of venue culture in Reykjavik – which is starting to dwindle thanks to a higher drinking age than most of Europe (20) and an overflow of tourists. The construction of high end hotels, some used primarily for overnight cruise stops, come with frequent noise complaints, meaning shows have to end early.
The noise festival, they tell me, only came about because there were too many noise complaints from naggy neighbors in Reykjavik. They tried to circumvent that by applying to become a church. “The Church of Noise,” Yuki smiles. “In Iceland, you can register as a religious organisation by filling out a form online,” Ronja elaborates. “There is this shortage of venues and we figured out, honestly, in good faith, you could construe something like always attending concerts as mass. We felt that there was a strong argument to be made that we could start the religious organisation, get tax status and a venue.”
“I think a good example of noise complaints influencing events is our collaboration with No Borders [an Icelandic charity advocating for refugee rights],” Yuki says. “It was in a venue called Lemmy, in downtown Reykjavik. They have this outside garden space. We were gonna do a two-day festival with two stages, one inside the bar and one outside. We had the whole stage ready, but then a neighbour came by who also used be involved with [the organisation] Reykjavík Public Health.”
“She was in charge of the liquor licenses,” Fía adds, “and she threatened Lemmy’s liquor license directly, because of a show before and she noticed us setting up for the second day.
“Yeah, because of the show the night before. And this is important: it was because she couldn’t hear her television. She was in her luxury apartment and couldn’t hear her television. That’s why she’s shutting down a grassroots organisation that was fundraising for immigrants.”
Spider Network is a queer, leftist collective, so their ethos is as much about ensuring Iceland doesn’t embrace isolationism and xenophobia and the growing far-right trends on continental Europe. The country’s flag has been co-opted by far-right groups across the nation, and the steps to Reykjavik’s Grafarvogur Lutheran church, which were once painted rainbow to support the LGBTQ+ community, have recently been defaced by red, white, and blue – the colours of the Icelandic flag.
Spider Network sees their music as inherently political, and MBS tries to facilitate a welcoming, inclusive space. During tech-pop band Krassoff’s excellent, eerie set on that Saturday, the voice of Snorri Másson, member of the far-right party Miðflokkurinn, can be heard. In protest, the dancers zip to life and parade with a new flag – one side has the pride flag, the other the Icelandic flag.
Icelandic identity is rapidly changing – tourism both economically feeds and culturally robs cities; far-right groups are on the rise while those writing about them are being laid off (Yuki tells me that there’s been a 69% decrease in payroll journalism in recent years).
When Spider Network play alongside Ronja, they capture a positive vision of the country’s future – a do-it-together attitude that makes art possible in any circumstances. When Ronja takes the makeshift stage, her long hair is obscured by a knitted devil-horned hat. Next to her, a Russian woman in a comically large hat cradles a mic, while two friends sidle up to the decks, one wearing a tie that says “YOU WOULD TRANS YOUR GENDER” in the same font as old-school movie piracy ads.
The group share a knowing glance, then dive into a breakbeat ballet dance, replete with ironic horn samples and ambient synths. Left of stage, the Russian woman screams into her mic. Ronja starts launching beats back and forth to her friends, who are all sucked into their laptops and no-input mixers, headbanging like they’re being shocked by their devices. Halfway through the set, Rósa Sif Welding Kristinsdóttir, drummer from Icelandic krautrock band BKPM, joins in, improvising on an acoustic kit in a way that gives glitched-out breaks a doom-y edge. Kids, grannies, bearded men in Laura Palmer t-shirts, and metalgoers dance together, silly and happy under the midnight sun.