Credit: Far Out / Aidan Zamiri
Mon 31 August 2026 4:00, UK
Caroline Polachek stands as one of the most refreshing figures in pop, having spent much of her career refusing to stay in one place, with her signature winding, Enya-like vocals frequently layered against contrasting soundscapes that balance avant-garde experimentation with genuinely infectious hooks.
Occasionally peppered with Spanish guitars and unexpected bagpipe solos, hit shuffle on Polachek’s discography, and you are likely to find yourself ricocheting between experimental pop, dream pop, electronic music and sounds that represent medieval melodies; her own iPod, it turns out, doesn’t look much different, if not broader.
Polachek’s musical taste is difficult to pin down. In a 2019 conversation with Interview, she listed influences spanning the Cocteau Twins to Joni Mitchell and Yves Tumor, alongside deep appreciation for Alex G and Katy Perry, while her appreciation for Enya began in her youth. As she recalled, “My parents got divorced when I was really young, and I was a very hyperactive kid, so both parents independently would play Enya at the house to calm me down and soothe me as a kid”.
When asked in the same conversation to name a song that could change the world if everyone heard it, Polachek went ahead and offered up an entire album in the form of Riceboy Sleeps, the 2009 collaboration between Jónsi, the frontman of Icelandic post-rock giants Sigur Rós, and his partner and composer Alex Somers.
An album that feels less like a collection of songs and more like a single environment gradually coming into focus, there are no obvious singles or conventional verse-chorus structures; instead, the music develops through accumulation, repetition and tiny shifts in texture, and for someone like Polacheck, who rarely rejects the pop song entirely, where even at her most experimental, her music tends to contain a hook, a melodic turn or some other point of entry, this is an interesting pick.
And yet there is a connection between Riceboy Sleeps and the singer-songwriter’s process, for both treat the studio as an instrument in itself, using unusual sounds, layered vocals and textural play to make familiar musical forms feel slightly alien, but where Polachek uses those ideas to make a pop song stranger, Riceboy Sleeps, or rather Jónsi and Somers, pushes the same curiosity towards an almost opposite extreme.
With tracks like ‘Boy 1904’, which has a children’s choir and swelling strings sit against a sparse electronic backdrop, and ‘All the Big Trees’ lets guitar, with bowed strings and environmental recordings bleeding into one another until it becomes difficult to distinguish one sound from the next, the album strips away the expectation that music should constantly resolve into something memorable, promoting a co-existence of disparate ideas to mirror how the world should exist at large.
For an artist whose own music is ornate, adventurous and deliberately difficult to categorise, Riceboy Sleeps reflects a similar desire to pursue musical freedom, without hooks to chase, structures to follow or expectations to meet, and with a career built around refusing to do what is expected of her, why settle for a single song when an entire album could change the world?
