Fat Northerner Records are proud to you offer you drugs, the new single from Icelandic avant-pop superstars Cynic Guru. Led by multi-talented singer/songwriter/violinist Roland Hartwell, a member of the Icelandic Symphony Orchestra who has played with Elvis Costello, Dr. Dre, Burt Bacharach and Barry White amongst others, Cynic Guru are blazing a trail in their homeland with their own unique brand of slightly skewed, deceptively dark pop music. Their forthcoming album, ‘Cynic Guru’, has already been a huge smash back home, where it was released by Iceland’s biggest record company to critical and commercial acclaim, spawning several hit singles, including ‘Drugs’ which reached number one in the Icelandic charts. It’s not difficult to figure out why ‘Drugs’ was such a succes in a country famed for it’s knack of making hugely accessible, yet incredibly weird pop music. On the surface, Cynic Guru are flaunting their obvious love for articulate pop like Tears for Fears, Talk Talk and ‘Band on the Run’ era Wings, but beneath the pretty McCartney-esque melodies and radio friendly production, lurks the kind of experimental mischief that has turned compatriots such as Bjork and Sigur Ros into figure- heds of alternative music, as well as global superstars. The mischief is there in the sounds Hartwell coaxes out of his violin (veering from angelic to demonic) it’s there in his bands schizophrenic leaps from pop to funk to metal to classical (often in the same song) and most disconcertingly, in the brilliantly bizarre lyrics of ‘Drugs’. ‘Drugs’ opens as a tale of typical youthful escapism, as a group of friends ‘decide to try a new drug, cos the typical is not enough’. However, soon enough, in Hartwell’s words, ‘something went wrong’. Quite what went wrong is unclear, until the song reaches it’s gloriously harrowing peak and we are informed of the fate of his friends...‘they say he jumped out of the window, the other cooked his face in a pan, another super-glued his eyes closed and I pulled all my teeth out with my bare hands’, Hartwell goes on to remind us of his own fate repeatedly, before inflicting similar torture on the violin he was carressing so delicately only seconds before. ‘Drugs’ is released by Fat Northerner on 26th November 2007, whilst the debut album ‘Cynic Guru’ will be released on 28th Jan 2008.