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I have to admit I was a little apprehensive at the thought of seeing Sigur Rós on their current tour. Their previous Australian shows were such wondrous affairs, full of waves of distortion and moments of heartbreaking precision, I wondered how their new, more upbeat material would fare in the aircraft hanger that is the Hordern Pavilion.

During the Takk tour, the opening and closing songs were delivered from behind a screen of nightmarish digital projection. The staging this time around is much simpler but highly effective: seven giant inflatable spheres suspended across the stage. As the house lights went down, the huge roar from the crowd at the sonar blips that mark the beginning of Svefn-g-englar suggested I had nothing to worry about.

The song is a favourite of longtime fans, but only a handful of older material made it onto the set-list. Still, Takk, and new album Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust have a natural fit. Sé Lest is a perfect example of their lighter mood on stage. The song sounds like a hundred music boxes all wound to a slightly different tempo, and the surrealist dial was turned up a notch by a four-piece brass band appearing out of nowhere, tuba’ing their way across the stage in dazzling white.

The brass section helped bring to life the raw joy that abounds on album tracks Við spilum endalaust and Inní mér syngur vitleysingur, as well as underscoring songs like Hoppípolla and Sæglópur with a new military precision – an effect helped further by Orri Páll Dýrason’s insane drum work. The brass also breathed new life into another old favourite, the crashing opening half of Ný Batterí contrasted with a disciplined, rhythmic second half; the order underlying a chaotic universe.

Jónsi Birgisson’s voice sounds as phenomenal live as it does on the new album. Using a mix of reverb and natural skill, he often held the final note of a song for over thirty seconds, filling the empty space of the Hordern like the voice of the elements. This clarity was particularly evident on Fljótavík, one of the few moments of quietude among all the organs and percussion, the gorgeous ballad performed against a simple wash of purple light and snow falling from the ceiling.

The oscillation between the shorter, raucously uplifting new songs and the more epic, reverb-heavy older material didn’t always sit perfectly, especially when the let’s-hammer-everything-we-have-on-stage cacophony of Hafsól seemed like the final song. Still, Kjartan Sveinsson’s piccolo flute outro led into an ecstatic rendition of Gobbledigook, and it’s hard to dispute the sheer euphoria of five thousand people handclapping and la-la-la-ing along with band under the shower of white confetti that brought the main set to an explosive conclusion.

Popplagið remains one of the band’s most dramatic and accomplished pieces, and it sounds much like I think the Apocalypse will. Cast into shadow by a fearsome strobe, Jónsi looked like the grim reaper armed with a violin bow, the floating spheres alternating red and white like all the moons in the galaxy colliding into nothingness. It’s a song that proves how much Sigur Rós really are in a class of their own, balanced on a knife edge between beauty and devastation. And if Popplagið was The End, the second encore brought the show to a gentle close, seven suns rising over a new world and the heartfelt emotion of the band’s only English song telling us no matter what happens, everything will be All Alright.