Kindsight is a new act from the Copenhagen indie scene and the first act outside of Sweden to sign with Rama Lama Records (Melby, Chez Ali, Steve Buscemi’s Dreamy Eyes etc.). Last fall, the young quartet released their two very promising debut tracks ‘Who Are You’ and ‘ Terminal Daze’. Two warm, nostalgic and atmospheric indie pop songs that got them praise such as “your new favourite band”. Now, the slow-burner ‘How I Feel’ follows and expands the sound of this promising act.
Kindsight are Nina, Søren, Anders and Johannes and formed out of Nina and Sørens shared love for The Sugarcubes. According to the band, the two of them then recruited drummer Johannes to “drag him out of an unsettling obsession with jazz-music” and bass player Anders was chosen “only because of his looks and his ability to fit into small bags.”.
The quartet makes retro-tinged indie pop that is instantly appealing and addictive. Nina’s vocals crowns the atmospheric soundscape perfectly and makes Kindsight something that’s been missing in Scandinavia for a long time.
Kindsight on ‘How I Feel’: Nina was once gripped by an overwhelming need to tell the world how she felt. Everyone agreed that it seemed like a fair deal, as she is the lead-singer. A longing ballad with a hazy view was built to heed her demand. But as it turns out, Nina hasn’t got a clue how she feels.
How I Feel is out now on all platforms via Rama Lama Records.
Swedish post-punk band Viagra Boys released a new album, “Welfare Jazz”, this week via YEAR0001 Records. Now that it’s out you can stream the whole thing here. It includes “Girls & Boys,” a new song they shared earlier this week. Since their founding in 2015, Swedish post-punk band Viagra Boys have made a name for themselves burning up stages around the world. There’s a little Iggy Pop spit and seethe, a David Yow drunken stumble, and a bite of Nick Cave’s haunted bark. Add a dash of motorik groove, a pinch of post-punk grime, and a dose of no wave howl.
For every gruff and gritty croak in the outfit’s catalogue, they come back with a pair of bongos, squared-off synths, and a squonky saxophone, with songs that deftly lay waste to society’s normalization of toxic masculinity, racism, misogyny, classism, and self-obsession.
Viagra Boys’ Sebastian Murphy dreams about everyone hating his guts. A lot. “I kept having this recurring nightmare where my mom was crying and my friends were all pissed off at me,” he recalls, almost reverently.
Viagra Boys previously released a video for Welfare Jazz’s “Creatures” . They also shared the album’s cover of the 1999 John Prine song “In Spite of Ourselves” featuring Amy Taylor of Australian rock band Amyl and the Sniffers. The band’s most recent release was their Common Sense EP, which came out back in March 2020 again on YEAR0001.
The band’s new album, Welfare Jazz, doesn’t bargain with the anxiety in that defeated feeling, but rather a boiling certainty that nothing and no one is absolute. There’s plenty of blame to go around, and things are just a lot more interesting when you admit that you’re not always going to be nice, you’re not always going to pick the right words in a fist-fight. So why not keep moving forward, swaying and strutting into the night.
Steve Buscemi’s Dreamy Eyes is an atmospheric indie pop band from Stockholm, Sweden. Our debut album ”Sweetie” is finally here! Thank you so much to all of you for supporting us through the years, listening to our songs, buying our records and merch and coming to our shows!
And a special thank you to our Master Producer Emil Aspegren for recording, mixing and mastering! And of course a big thank you to Axel and Sixten at Rama Lama Records for believing in us from the start!
Behind the odd name Steve Buscemi’s Dreamy Eyes is one of the two bands that have been with us from the very start (the other being Melby). The band’s first single “Desire” went straight into our hearts and the thoughts of starting a label became more concrete since we already knew the band members. The band formed in 2015 after bassist/vocalist Tilde tweeted out “Does anyone/anybody know someone who wants to play in a band together with a bassist and a singer that haven’t played in a band for a year and are dying of boredom?”. Guitarist/vocalist Elias Mahfoud responded and the rest is history. Their dynamic and dreamy indie pop have constantly been developing during the band’s career and even though we’ve seen them more times than we can count we never get tired of it. When lead vocalist Siri Sjöberg lifts one end of her synthesizer and bangs her head in her signature move, you know it’s time to party with Stevie B.
Siri Sjöberg (vocals, synth), Tilde Hansen (vocals, bass), Elias Mahfoud (vocals, guitar), Eric Boström Wallin (drums)
Dream-indie at its best” – Ja Ja Ja The sweetest indie-pop songs to back up the incredible name”– DIY” Swoops straight into the part of your brain that’ll never forget it” – The Line of Best Fit This highly likable four-piece blend indie noir with dramatic dream pop textures with almost effortless precision”– Record Collector Magazine
Stylistic shifts have been the norm for Sweden’s I Break Horses – from the traditional rock sound of Hearts, their debut from almost a decade ago, to the electronic synthpop of its follow up Chiaroscuro in 2014. Both commendable releases, they were always an act searching for a sound that truly fit their ambitions, a search this sepia-tinged, darkly cinematic release has concluded.
More than ever a solo vehicle for Maria Lindén, this is the most focused I Break Horses record to date and follows a troublesome gestation period with a back story of failed collaborations and music lost on broken hard drives. Initial sketches for the record were created as imaginary scores while watching her favourite films with the sound turned down, and these dramatic ambient pieces were used as a blueprint for the record. The original intention of an instrumental album is evident in its wide-reaching ambition and tricksy intricate detailing pushed to the fore by Lindén; her voice is used more as an atmosphere, a distant hush throughout. “Warnings” has a desaturated gloom. A feeling of colour rushing from you and filling the sky. Its long halls of reverb and empty spaceships of delay somehow encapsulates the stillness you get before a panic attack and that calm as you faint.
At times, it’s a record that luxuriates in wondering what if you had wandered up a crumbling path to a parallel world. A place that’s now just out of reach.
In almost any other year, this would be my album of the year and it was definitely my salvation for many weeks of it. Maybe the only reason it isn’t top of the tree is because the 500% slowed grooves matched my mood almost too well… and I wish it didn’t resonate so deeply.
Lyrically musing on love and loss, on opening track “Turn” she delivers one of the year’s most direct observations on the futility of keeping a broken relationship alive: “Maybe we’re fucking with absent minds / While our hearts are breaking.” Musically venturing into new areas such as thunderous trip-hop beats, propulsive arpeggiated basslines, swirling dreampop with hypnotic synth chords, introspective coldwave, and on highlight “Neon Lights” she takes the flatness of krautrock and sprinkles it with an ’80s pop fizz, all done with a deft touch.
Since their founding in 2015, Swedish post-punk band Viagra Boys have made a name for themselves burning up stages around the world. There’s a little Iggy Pop spit and seethe, a David yow drunken stumble, and a bite of Nick Cave’s haunted bark. add a dash of motorik groove, a pinch of post-punk grime, and a dose of no wave howl. for every gruff and gritty croak in the outfit’s catalogue, they come back with a pair of bongos, squared-off synths, and a squonky saxophone, with songs that deftly lay waste to society’s normalization of toxic masculinity, racism, misogyny, classism, and self-obsession.
Viagra Boys’ Sebastian Murphy dreams about everyone hating his guts a lot. “I kept having this recurring nightmare where my mom was crying and my friends were all pissed off at me,” he recalls, almost reverently. the band’s new album, “Welfare Jazz”, doesn’t bargain with the anxiety in that defeated feeling, but rather a boiling certainty that nothing and no one is absolute.
There’s plenty of blame to go around, and things are just a lot more interesting when you admit that you’re not always going to be nice, you’re not always going to pick the right words in a fist-fight. so why not keep moving forward, swaying and strutting into the night.
In loving memory of John Prine From the album ‘Welfare Jazz’, out January 8th on YEAR0001
A dark and tattooed attitude with a dance floor punk throb. All hail Viagra Boys. Sweden’s finest.
A re-release of the Stockholm sextet’s debut album with extra tracks. Produced by Daniel Fagerstrom (Skull Defekts, Chronic Heist) and Pete Gunnerfeldt (The Hives). Sebastian Murphy (vocals), Henrik Höckert (bass), Benjamin Vallé (guitar), Oskar Carls (saxophone) Martin Ehrencrona and Tör Sjodén (drums) deliver a satirical punk-rock take on masculinity. Caustic and caustic with powerful dance-floor devastating rhythms of pounding motoring beats that are powered by churning bass, swinging broken-glass formed guitars and of course the drums – the relentless no-prisoners-here drums. A theatrical, passionate vocal shower storm of proclamatory emotional outbursts cajole and entreat you and always carry you away. An intense, unusual and captivating blend of theatrics, rockabillyroll, post-punk and dark power.
‘Just Like You’ from our debut album ‘Street Worms’.
At the start of 2020, it looked as if Arre! Arre! had the year all mapped out; plenty more touring to come in support of last year’s incendiary Tell Me All About Them LP, as well as a new EP, the riotous Heavy Breathing, set for a summer release. Then, in March, the pandemic changed every-thing, and suddenly – like millions of others worldwide – the Malmö punks unexpectedly had plenty of time on their hands.
Singer and bassist Katja Nielsen has been putting it to good use. “After COVID-19 hit and gigs were being cancelled,” she says, “I found myself in a vacuum that needed to be filled with creativity.” Isolation lent itself naturally to the start of a solo project, She/Beast, to be written and produced entirely by Nielsen herself – which suited the subject matter. “Because of the personal nature of what I was writing about, I felt that I would not be able to share ownership of the songs the way I do in Arre! Arre! I wanted every little detail to be exactly the way I wanted it to be.”
About a year before she began work on She/Beast material, Nielsen was finally diagnosed with bipolar disorder after over a decade of suffering from it. Music, she says, was a crucial outlet for her to channel the rawness of her emotions, to spill her feelings into words and melodies. “Writing music has always been a coping strategy for me. Feelings get bottled up in a very destructive way if I don’t write a song about something I’m going through.”
The result is a pair of EPs, In the Depths of Misery and This Too Shall Pass; both titles are quotes from Vincent Van Gogh, another artist to have had bipolar, and taken together, they represent the emotional arc of the songs, which encompass despair, resolve and hope: there’s frustration in ‘Devil on My Mind’, resignation on ‘A Fragile State of Mind’, and fizzing anger on ‘Take My Pills’. “Just imagine being told that some of your personal traits are symptoms, and if you take your pills those traits will disappear,” Nielsen explains of her diagnosis. “Some of them I was happy to get rid of, and some I still mourn. Making sense of what’s a symptom and what’s a part of my personality – that’s what can be so tricky with having a mental illness. But by writing these songs, I could process one piece of the disorder at a time.”
Written and arranged entirely in Nielsen’s living room, the ten songs over the two EPs were recorded in conjunction with producer Joar Anderson. They mark a dramatic departure from the furious pace of Arre! Arre!’s output, instead evincing a lo-fi, pop-rock sound; the DIY nature of the songs strongly recalls Kathleen Hanna’s 1997 solo record Julie Ruin, whilst the instrumentation – growling bass, scuzzy guitars, snarled vocals – take their cues from both riot grill and post punk. “The DIY thing is just imprinted in my genes. If I could choose, we’d all still record songs in our garage, with just a tape recorder.”
Taken together, In the Depths of Misery and This Too Shall Pass represent an impressively accomplished first solo statement from an artist who, were it not for COVID-19, might not have re-leased one this soon – ten songs scored through with a palpable darkness, in keeping with Nielsen’s vision for the tracks to feel “uneasy and on the verge of despair, kinda like a silent horror film.” There should be more to come, too, as she continues to write on her laptop. “I usually do it in front of the tv – it’s kinda like knitting to me!”
Anna von Hausswolff is a musician and composer exploring the myriad of possibilities and the potential for new expressions on the pipe organ.
On her continued and successful campaign to make the pipe organ cool again, Anna von Hausswolff will release “All Thoughts Fly” in September which features just the artist and the organ. “I wanted to play with dissonance and polyrhythms to create a harmonic landscape that is constantly changing and expanding into something else,” Anna says of the title track. “Everything you hear in this track, every little overtone and all ambience is entirely made through the organ. We used EQ but that’s it. The overall idea was to create an illusion of flying thoughts, intertwining and entangling into each other. Different words and worlds happening at the same time, affecting each other and changing each other’s directions and courses.”
Sacro Bosco (“Sacred Grove”) is the starting point for Anna von Hausswolff’s new album All Thoughts Fly, incoming on Southern Lord on 25th September. Here in solo instrumental mode, the entire record consists of just one instrument, the pipe organ, and represents absolute liberation of the imagination. All Thoughts Fly radiates a melancholic beauty, and is distinguished by fluid transitions of contrasting elements; calmness and drama, harmony and dissonance, much like the place that inspires the music.
Sacro Bosco is a garden, based in the centre of Italy, containing grotesque mythological sculptures and buildings overgrown with vegetation, situated in a wooded valley beneath the castle of Orsini. Created during the 16th Century, Sacro Bosco was commissioned by Pier Francesco Orsini, some say to try and cope with his grief following the death of his wife Guilia Farnese, others speculate the purpose was to create art.
About the album Anna explains “there’s a sadness and wilderness that inspired me to write this album, also a timelessness. I believe that this park has survived not only due to its beauty but also because of the iconography, it has been liberated from predictable ideas and ideals. The people who built this park truly set their minds and imagination free. All thoughts fly is a homage to this creation, and an effort to articulate the atmosphere and the feelings that this place evokes inside of me. It’s a very personal interpretation of a place that I lack the words to describe. I’d like to believe Orsini built this monumental park out of grief for his dead wife, and in my Sacro Bosco I used this story as a core for my own inspiration: love as a foundation for creation.”
The accompanying video for the first single “Sacro Bosco” is, just like the music, an interpretation of the park with an imaginary twist. Directed by Gustaf and Ludvig Holtenäs.
Anna summarises, “Sacro Bosco in Bomarzo is a creation carved out from one man’s head. A frozen thought lasting throughout time and touching people across generations. All thoughts fly, Ogni Pensiero Vola, is about this: the importance of sharing for surviving, creating space and evolving. Once you’ve shared your words they are not only yours anymore.”
All Thoughts Fly ultimately embodies the exploration of any and all possibilities, and the audience is invited to listen, liberate the mind and let it wander.
The organ on All Thoughts Fly is situated in Gothenburg and is a Swedish replica of the Arp Schnitger organ in Germany. It is the largest organ tuned in Quarter-comma meantone temperament in the world. With it’s four manuals, one pedal and 54 stops, it was built as part of a ten-year research project reconstructing 17th Century North German organ building craft. The tuning temperament is an important detail to note here, as it deeply affects the sound and tuning, and thus radically changed the process of creating this album. Anna speaks of a pleasant surprise during recording, the organ’s ability to create beautiful “pitching” notes through its stops and air supply system. She remarks “We took advantage of this so most of the pitching sounds and notes that you hear on the album comes from the mechanics of this organ, effects made entirely acoustically.” The organ was recorded with two room mics for atmosphere and two pairs of close mics placed inside the organ to capture nuances and detail for further organ sound processing by Filip Leyman in his studio.
As well as founding Fleetwood Mac, the late Peter Green was arguably the finest British blues guitarist, singer and songwriter of his generation. This 4-CD boxed set showcases his dazzling talent across numerous broadcasts, spanning studio performances for the BBC and live sets in San Francisco, Finland and Sweden. Capturing him at the peak of his powers between early 1968 and late 1969, it comes complete with a booklet containing background notes and rare images, making it an essential purchase for his army of admirers. Collection of Fleetwood Mac performances led by the late great Peter Green
Includes performances captured for broadcast on British, American and Scandinavian radio stations
Original Live Broadcasts 1968 BBC includes Top Gear, January 21st 1968: Top Gear, March 24th 1968: Saturday Club, April 13th 1968, Top Gear, June 2nd 1968: Top Gear, July 7th 1968:
Radio One O’clock, August 26th 1968: Top Gear, October 13th 1968: Top Gear, November 24th 1968: Live At The Carousel Ballroom, San Francsico,
8th June 1968, KSAN-FM, Live In Kulttuuritalo, Helsinki, Finland, 24th September 1969, Yleisradio Oy (Yle), Live At The Cue Club, Gothenburg, Sweden, 2nd November 1969, Sveriges Radio
PNKSLM Recordings are beyond excited to announce the second full length from Stockholm’s Les Big Byrd. Consisting of Jocke Åhlund, Nino Keller, Frans Johansson & Martin “Konie” Ehrencrona, Les Big Byrd have been consistently one of the most exciting bands at the forefront of the Swedish Psych music scene. Following on from 2014’s “The Worshipped Cats” LP (A Recordings),“Iran Iraq IKEA” showcases the band perfectly with their strongest collection of songs yet.
Les Big Byrd’s second album “Iran Iraq IKEA” has been one of the best out of Sweden of the year, and we’re now on our third pressing! To celebrate, we’ve made a very special reissue, with an exclusive sleeve pressed with gold foil.
Keeping to the gold theme, the deluxe package also includes an exclusive matte gold coloured vinyl, and an exclusive Iran Iraq IKEA t-shirt – only 75 available!
The Fat Angel Sings 