RÚV Rás 2RÚV Rás 2

For half a century Icelandic radio meant one channel. Rás 2 arrived on 1 December 1983 as RÚV's second, broadcasting from Efstaleiti, and the split let the older one keep the morning prayers and the string quartets while this one took the records. It reaches the island from some ninety FM transmitters, 99.9 on the dial in the capital, and it went out on longwave from 1999 until 2024 for the boats and the farms sitting past the end of the FM network, with a satellite feed carrying it further still for a time.

Count the artists in any given hour and most of them are Icelandic: young pop singers and songwriters next to the post-punk and seventies folk-rock the country exported or kept to itself, with a rap lane of its own running from the nineties pioneers to the current chart names. Hulda Geirsdóttir opens Sundays on Fyrst á fætur, and Baksýnisspegillinn goes back for whatever the week has earned.