Muck Show That Iceland Isn’t Just a Place for Pretty Music

There are a few good things to know about the country of Iceland. The weather isn't as cold and barren as the name suggest, the country has numerous volcanoes, and there's a growing heavy music scene. It's true, not everything coming out of the country is lucid sounding or music to pick flowers to.

"There are a lot of good heavy bands here and the extreme music scene here is really flourishing now in my opinion," Muck drummer Âsí Thordarson told Noisecreep. "I think when foreign people think of the Icelandic music scene, they often tend to think Sigur Ros, Bjork -- but extreme music is gaining a lot of fans here. The bands in this genre here in Iceland don't get a lot of airplay, but pretty much every show is well attended."

Though only a young band, beginning in 2007, Muck have used the internet to get their demo heard far and wide, resulting in the band taking their first trip through Europe over this past summer. On the brief tour, the band made a mark by grabbing new fans -- as well as much acclaim, hailing them as a band to watch.

It's not an easy task to describe the sound of Muck. Melodies and harmonies exist, but under a suffocating landscape of distortion, the band ends up as something akin to an art collective taking a swing at loud volume rather then the typical heavy band. "We just say 'hardcore' now when people ask us to describe our sound," Thordarson explains. "But I think we always see it as something more, more progressive maybe. It's not typical hardcore stuff." And the band is right, in the traditional sense of hardcore -- the band would not fit in, but their approach may be the result of being so far away from the major and plagiarized scenes.

For Thordarson, he discovered hardcore after moving from a small town to the capital Reykjavik and felt some form of connection to the attitude and passion displayed in the shows he went to. "I think initially I was attracted by the unity I found in the scene here, as well as how open people seemed to be. A lot of tolerance for people that were different," he says. "It felt so much like home. I'd have to give credit to I Adapt and Strike Anywhere for being my guides at the time I was first starting to go to shows."

Right now the members of Muck are working on their full-length that they hope to take into the studio come January. "It's going to be epic, I think," Thordarson comments. "The plan after that is to do more tours, play as many countries as we can."