Skip to content
New Music

Jónsi’s New EDM Cover of “Simple Gifts” for The Circle Soundtrack is Hilarious

The fellas in Sigur Rós have been on one lately. It was just last week that the Icelandic band announced their own personal edibles line, perhaps inspired by their recent involvement with Planet Earth II. It seems like an issue of purposeful planning that the Sigur-Rós-related news that we are relaying to you on 4/20 is not that tidbit, but no matter.

The band’s lead singer and noted solo artist Jónsi has just released a song he contributed to the soundtrack for The Circle, the new Dave Eggers adaptation produced by Tom Hanks, and co-starring Hanks and Emma Watson. (This is somehow the second Eggers movie Hanks has been involved with in the past year.) The main score from the film comes from Hollywood’s GOAT mastermind of cornball gothic eerieness Danny Elfman, but it’s already clear that Jónsi’s song will make a big impression no matter how it’s used in the film. The track is a vocoder-heavy, reharmonized rendition of the Shaker folk song “Simple Gifts,” which was most famously interpreted by composer Aaron Copland in his Applachian Spring suite.

An instant reference point for the track is Imogen Heap’s “Hide and Seek,” but it takes an unexpected turn 40 seconds in, evoking a college-age struggle-M83, fresh off of a leisurely spring break spent smoking wax and sampling his mom’s Enya Pandora station. This is wild, must-listen stuff.

Listen to “Simple Gifts” over at Pitchfork, and go see The Circle–or grab its apparently insane soundtrack–on April 28.