After a full decade living in the United States, singer-guitarist Jökull Júlíusson from the Icelandic rock band KALEO is still digging deep into the American roots of rock, blues, and soul. Just a few weeks ago, he finally made it to the infamous crossroads in Clarksdale, Mississippi, the legendary spot where Robert Johnson supposedly sold his soul to the devil in exchange for some otherworldly blues skills.
Júlíusson also gets to New Orleans when he can to absorb the rich musical culture there, and he’s always ready to work with soul masters the Dap-Kings whenever in New York. Now he has his sights on another historic spot: the studios of Muscle Shoals in Alabama, where essential records have been created by Aretha Franklin, the Rolling Stones,and the Black Keys. So the legendary crossroads was merely the latest stop on that endless tour of discovery.
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“As a blues fan, it’s one of those pilgrimage trips you have to make,” says Júlíusson, aka JJ Julius Son, now 34. “I try to use my environment when I can, you know?”
That same sense of history and place is the foundation of KALEO’s sound, which echoes the textures and twang of classic rock, blues, folk, and soul. That puts the band in league with acts like Jack White and the Black Keys, along with earlier generations of guitar-based music—a sound that can be heard on KALEO’s new album, Mixed Emotions, set for release on May 9 from Elektra. It is the band’s first album since the 2015 single “Way Down We Go” (from the album A/B) became an international career-defining hit with more than 1.3 billion listens on Spotify, while hitting No. 1 on Billboard‘s Alternative Songs chart.
“That’s closest to my heart—blues, rock, folk. I just love melodies. That’s what gets me into it, first and foremost,” says Júlíusson, who also studied classical music as a child. He’s talking via Zoom from Iceland, where he splits his time with his current musical base of Nashville.
“What it comes down to is the songwriting,” he adds. For him, any song requires that “at the end of the day, you know it has soul and you mean it. I’ve got to write these songs for myself. I’m not writing for anybody else. And I’ve got to like it before I’m going to let anybody else hear it and hopefully like it. I try to pour emotion into it and make it soulful. Those are the most important things.”
The band came out of the small Icelandic town of Mosfellsbær, a suburb of the capital Reykjavik, where Júlíusson and his friends in middle school first made music together. As a band, they took their name from the Hawaiian word for “the voice.” While his home country is best known musically for the atmospheric and avant-garde work of Björk and Sigur Rós, Júlíusson and his partners most frequently found their greatest inspirations in the rock and blues recorded through the decades by Led Zeppelin and the Beatles, Muddy Waters, and Howlin’ Wolf.
“I’ve always been obsessed with music and I’m kind of a historian as well when it comes to music,” explains Júlíusson, who sings in a deeply expressive, soulful voice in the best tradition of his heroes. “I really do the research and dig in.” His knowledge was also fed by a father who grew up in the classic rock era, and from there he dug deeper into the past. “From the ‘60s, you go back to the ‘50s and you discover rock ‘n’ roll—the early stuff—and right from there, you go back to the blues.”
When KALEO left Iceland, they landed first in Austin, and made their U.S. debut at the South By Southwest Festival in 2015. Within a few years, Júlíusson moved to Nashville, a major music capital crowded with first-rate recording studios and session players.
“If I need Irish flutes or a harp, it doesn’t matter what instrument it is, you can have somebody there in 15 minutes,” he says. “Despite Nashville being a very happening city right now, obviously growing hugely, it has that local feel, which I can relate to from Iceland.”
Last July, the band released “USA Today,” an early single from the new album, which confronts what the singer calls “gun-related atrocities” in his adopted home. Beginning with a solemn piano melody, the song grows edgier as he sings: “Have you seen my bullet fly?/Oh, here’s the first of many … Loaded gun in your face/People want to know your name.”
As a new U.S. resident, he became aware of the national gun culture and frequent shootings. “It’s definitely something that I’m still getting used to,” he says. “Not to say that it’s only happening in the U.S. But it was something very different from my reality and just a very, very heartbreaking thing to watch over and over again.”
Elsewhere on Mixed Emotions are rowdier tracks like “Rock N Roller” and the new single “Back Door,” long a popular song in the band’s live repertoire, with flinty guitars and a vaguely punk rock beat. There’s also the wounded balled “Lonely Cowboy,” as the singer laments: “When the desert night is cold, I just want someone to hold me close/I don’t wanna die alone, who’s gonna love me when I’m gone?”
“That’s kind of like a Western film. More storytelling on that one for sure,” he explains. “I have no problem going heavy or being direct on lyrics. I enjoy that.”
The album closes with “Sofdu Unga Ástin Mín,” a traditional song in the Icelandic language, a lullaby that his mother used to sing to him as a child. The title translates as “Sleep, my little love,” and JJ says, “It’s technically the first song that I would’ve heard ever.” The song is remade in an epic rock context, with big guitar flourishes, and is one of only two songs KALEO performs in their native tongue.
For KALEO’s music, he says, songs “just seem to happen more naturally in English for some reason.”
As it turns out, KALEO—which also includes drummer Davíð Antonsson, bassist Daniel Kristjánsson, guitarist Rubin Pollock, and harmonicist Þorleifur Gaukur Davíðsson—hasn’t played a real concert in Iceland for a decade, though the country is still where the members reconvene to rehearse for tours and occasionally record. The band is often busy elsewhere, Júlíusson explains, but the music scene there has taken a hit in other ways.
“Unfortunately, they’ve just torn down so many clubs and venues and, and built hotels here,” he explains. “It’s becoming tourist mania in Iceland. We’re about a 400,000 people population, and I think we have about 2 million tourists every year.
“What defines the music scene in Iceland is probably just that people are pretty fearless to kind of do what they want, whichever genre that is,” adds the singer, whose current favorite Icelandic band is the reggae group Hjálmar. “There’s absolutely not a lot of rock ‘n’ roll bands in Iceland and maybe in general at the moment. The music scene is defined by people doing whatever and following through with it.”
He hopes to see KALEO play an Iceland date this summer. Maybe KALEO’s return performance will inspire some movement in support of live music? “I’m trying to encourage the government and everyone to build more clubs and venues,” Júlíusson says. “I think we do need it.”
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