AS-Blog-6

Sweden is veeerrrry, veeerrrry slowly starting to emerge from the winter (in the south at least; winter in the north of the country is kind of a nine-month long affair, so it’ll probably be a while it escapes from snow and cold) and excitement is starting to build up again for spring and summer, when it’ll be possible to leave the house without getting frost-burns and daylight will last for more than twenty minutes. It’s therefore time to celebrate this with another dose of Swedish music, so we have, in collaboration with Nordic By Nature and STIM, three of the best tracks from the last month waiting for you as you scroll the page. Read on and enjoy.

Photo: Moa Romanova

Photo: Moa Romanova

Gothenburg musician Åsa Söderqvist is the mastermind behind SHIT KID (which is by the way, a fantastic band name) who tried her luck with a number of different musical projects (including a spell at music school and some time in a feminist punk band). Söderqvist’s approach to music is pretty dismissive of musical norms, experimenting with weird instrumentation and  feeding guitar solos through vocal effects to get the unique sound she’s looking for. And that approach pays off big time on her debut single Oh Please Be A Cocky Cool Kid, which sounds simultaneously like a garage rock track and like something entirely stranger.

Pair that with Söderqvist’s snarky, character loaded vocal and ability to capture a scene lyrically (‘I need you laying on my dirty floor, saying shit that you already know’) makes Oh Please… one of the freshest, most exciting things we’ve heard all year. And it was apparently written after Söderqvist came home from a party drunk at 4am and wrote a song about a guy she met at a party, whispering the vocal so as not to wake the neighbours. It’s that cliched rom-com story, old as time itself; Girl meets boy, gets nowhere, gets drunk, staggers home and writes one of the best warped-pop songs of the year. I’m pretty sure that was the essential plot to Romeo & Juliet too, now that I think about it.

tussilago

Stockholmers TUSSILAGO recently had a bit of a line-up shuffle, Karl ‘Hovis’ Hovmark joining Pierre Riddez, Rickard Renström, Samuel Lundin and Andreas Sjöqvist after drummer Zacharias Zachrisson left to pursue solo projects. They’ve been working on the follow-up to their 2015 debut Holy Train, and finally dropped a new single, Colors, in February (we’ll forgive them the incorrect, Yankee spelling of ‘Colours’). It’s a typically TUSSILAGO song, a piece of lush indie-pop jam-packed with melody and a wistful melancholy. Colors is out now on INGRID and a new TUSSILAGO EP is due soon.

Photo: Fredrik Andersson

Photo: Fredrik Andersson

The rock band cliché (four-piece guitar/bass/drums line-up, sunglasses indoors etc) attracts a lot of derision these days, and enough terrible bands have wallowed in it that deserves it (Here’s looking at you, U2). But there’s a reason that aesthetic became popular enough to become a cliché in the first place; because if you have enough panache and, importantly, the songs to pull it off, it is pretty fucking cool. And Stockholm band MOON CITY BOYS have the panache, and definitely have the songs. Their latest single, City, bounces along on a gutter-groove guitar riff, with frosty vocals that perfectly capture that the-world-is-swirling-around-me sense of urban tension. It is essentially a really, really good guitar-rock song, and there are very few things around better than that. MOON CITY BOYS are currently working on their debut album, due out sometime soon.