See, this is what happens when those damn car commercials won’t stop ripping off your tunes: The Guardian reports that Jón þór Birgisson, Georg Hólm, Kjartan Sveinsson and Orri Páll Dýrason—a.k.a. those lovable lads from Reykjavik, Sigur Rós—have been charged with tax evasion by the government of their island homeland. All four members—who’ve reportedly had their considerable assets frozen—are claiming that the unpaid taxes were the fault of a former accountant who underpaid their tax returns from 2011 to 2014, to a tune of 151 Icelandic kroner, the American value of which we’ll leave as an exercise for the reader to determine. (Okay, pencils down: It’s about $1.2 million—not Wesley Snipes money, but still enough to get all four of them in significant trouble.)
Icelandic tax rates are, of course, famously high, with the country’s most successful mournful soundscape creators paying fully 46 percent of their wealth as income tax. Said money then goes to pay for public healthcare and other services, such as fjord preservation, probably, and the creation of yet more moody, beautiful soundscapes. The members of Sigur Rós have vowed to clear their names—which is also the subject of our thrilling screenplay, The Fúgítívés—while their lawyer has contended that “The members of Sigur Rós are musicians—not experts on bookkeeping and international finance,” —again, a show that we’d probably watch.