Viagra Boys: Meet the Swedish Rockers Bringing Back Punk

Society’s most loathsome concepts are generally greatest confronted by the unlikeliest of cultural critics. Simply take a look at Viagra Boys, a Stockholm-based punk-rock outfit whose very title is a parody of hypermasculinity and raging alpha males’ frequent lack of ability to carry out. However their musical performances—on document and particularly onstage—are nothing if not potent. The non secular descendants of teams like Nick Cave and the Dangerous Seeds, the Fall, and the Butthole Surfers, Viagra Boys are identified for making the form of rumbling, menacing music that critics prefer to name post-punk. As with all nice act of that ilk, their true energy comes as a lot from their sound because it does from the caustic chunk of their worldview.

And guess what? Viagra Boys hate fascists. Specifically, they hate the Sweden Democrats, the far-right social gathering waging an ideological warfare on immigrants and non secular minorities that carried 18 % of the vote in the newest basic election. “That is not a majority, nevertheless it’s nonetheless rather a lot,” bassist Henrik Höckert says through a day Zoom name. “Twenty years in the past, they’d 1.5 %.” “They’re the Nazis, just about,” provides Sebastian Murphy, the band’s half-Swedish, half-American lead singer, who grew up within the Bay Space however has made his residence in Stockholm for a dozen years.

That disdain for right-wing extremists and their boorish patriarchy in decline is totally manifest on Welfare Jazz, the alternately narcotic and blistering new Viagra Boys album, their second full-length since 2018. Their debut LP, Avenue Worms—together with their bleakly humorous, semi-narrative music movies—garnered them a cult following, and three years later, when seemingly all mainstream manliness comes with a ramekin of additional toxicity on the aspect, the Viagra Boys’ model of social punditry appears poised to interrupt via to a wider viewers. On brooding, pulsing tracks, Murphy proves himself an professional chronicler of the darker corners of the male mind, dissecting masculinity in all its ridiculousness whereas he sings in character as one of many hapless shitheads he is criticizing. “I do not want no girl telling me when to go to mattress,” he wails on “Toad,” later explaining, “as a result of I have been residing on the outskirts of society my complete life.” It is a grim continuation of the themes he explored on “Simply Like You,” a spotlight from Avenue Worms. Murphy spends many of the music drawling about pleasantries just like the little canine he and his loving spouse have of their good home. However there is a sneer in his voice and a bitter tablet embedded within the dreamlike lyrics. On the finish, our narrator is completely happy to wake and discover himself again in his actual, dismal life, his “endless hate for this utterly fucked-up society” intact. “Thank God I by no means went to high school,” he concludes. “Thank God I did not find yourself identical to you.”

Murphy’s lyrics pull off the tough trick of balancing his performing persona together with his position as trenchant observer. “It is 50–50,” he says. “Half of it’s an act, and half of it is sort of a diary in a manner. I do not do it consciously, however subconsciously it turns into satire of myself and others.” This type of darkly humorous character-based lyricism locations Murphy in a proud lineage. He cites as strands of his personal artistic DNA “quite a lot of nation artists and the form of outdated punk that integrated comedy into the lyrics—not simply anger and melancholy.” In truth, the brand new album ends with a lumbering, unsettling cowl of John Prine’s “In Spite of Ourselves,” with Amy Taylor from Australian punk rockers Amyl and the Sniffers taking up the half that Iris DeMent sang within the unique. It is a type of transcendent songs that proudly have a good time love among the many fallen class, and it serves as the proper capstone to Welfare Jazz.