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“It has become a depressing world right now; the climate is shit and everybody’s fighting and shooting other people. There was a mass shooting in Denmark this week…it all starts to feel like a Cave World. Everyone is starting to act like monkeys.”
Tor Sjödén is on the other side of the line talking about Viagra Boys new LP released last week. Instead of being on the tour bus with the rest of the band he is on parental leave and taking in the slower life at his home in Sweden. With a coffee in hand and keeping an eye on his two kids we talked together before he was due to take them to the park for an afternoon play. Hope they didn’t overhear his comment about the state of the world he brought them in.
Viagra Boys are not a typical band by any stretch of the imagination. Any group that gives its members leave during a major tour seems different from the norm however even this shouldn’t come as a surprise to those wise to the first few notes of any of their catalogue. This band does not give a fuck about what is considered “typical” in the age of over stylised social media driven music. Embracing the notion to evolve and forge a path where each member feels like they can do whatever they wish with the group lends more towards a free jazz inspiration than any tried structure of modern music. In a way Viagra Boys are kind of tapping into a notion of seeing bands that are shit in some ways
“Yes of course, it’s a way for us to feel alive. It is important to be bad in a good way…it [must] feel it’s alive. The rock and roll image feels very 2002. I don’t know what that is anymore but maybe it’s all about insecurity, being an asshole…jazz connection to punk is a huge inspiration for us. That sense of jazziness; a sense of not playing all the right notes. People are really into that…so much music these days are played by machines so all there is left is to not play the right notes because the machines are only playing the right notes.”
That said don’t write off the skill or scope of the song writing on display in the new LP “Cave World”. Released last week on their label Year0001 its twelve tracks burst forth in a blitz of succent, pummelling, effective, thought provoking and emotionally driven pieces that all kick off with little to no hesitation and impressively keep the intensity up so well that the 40-min run time feels both shorter and longer. Not a typical band at all.
While the same hard-hitting Stooges influenced grooves are throughout, other influences come into the fold with Devo new wave on “Troglodyte” or Gorillaz sing-along hip-hop of “The Cognitive Trade-off Hypothesis”. Even country style square dancing stomping peeks with their latest single “Punk Rock Loser”. As much as the Viagra Boys set out to to be playing wrong notes the song writing has not suffered as a result.
“Our angle for this record was to work on the songs more as a band. Where other efforts we did in bits and pieces then tie it together in some way but this one was more of a band effort. We have tried a few new songs live and they feel really natural to be playing them. We have only been adding” Ain’t No Thief” and “Troglodyte” to the sets recently and they go really well. After the summer over here, we are going to build a live show based on the new record in the upcoming tours in the United Sates that start in September which we are looking forward to.”
It appears if all the newer songs reflect that idea of evolution with the band experimenting with different sounds and different pallets.
“It’s so nice to evolve as a human it’s a great thing actually, that’s been evolving with this band; it’s a nice more forgiving community. I’m not the same person that I was even five years ago…. Everybody in the band listens to so much different music and we just feel confident that if its good its good and we think about it too much or worry about how people will react. We always had slower or different songs on our last records, but we really wanted to make them work live before we recorded them, so it doesn’t feel like another band. We feel like we can do anything with this band. It feels very inspiring; Viagra Boys could put out a techno album and our fans would still accept it because they are really open and forgiving. It’s really inspiring and important to keep evolving and not keep putting out the same albums every year. It’s not for us. Eighty percent of the people just want to hear Sports anyway and that’s fine…we love our fans without them we are nothing but we do try to trick them into liking the weird stuff. ”
Honestly more bands with their profile should be adopting the riskier side of punk rock and embracing releasing weird stuff. If they want to make a techno album next, then why the fuck not. It would still be pure energetic bliss without losing the sound they have harnessed over their seven-year career. Tor even hints at a potential shift into more experimental musical styles.
“A lot of bands have done that. Bowie, Kiss they have done weird shit as well. Every interesting band has done some weird shit, you know we are all going to die so why not do some weird stuff.”
Cave World is out now, making the world weirder through Year0001.