FEATURE:
Spotlight
PHOTO CREDIT: Fredrik Bengtsson
if they are playing near you. For this Spotlight, I am highlighting a band I thought I have covered before. It is a bit of omission on my part. However, I am rectifying that now. Viagra Boys are a group that you need to follow. A phenomenal Swedish punk band formed 2015. Their current line-up consists of lead singer Sebastian Murphy alongside Linus Hillborg (guitar), Elias Jungqvist (keyboards), Henrik Höckert (bass), Tor Sjödén (drums), and Oskar Carls (saxophone). Viagra Boys’ lyrics are known for using satire and dark humour to criticise hypermasculinity and far-right conspiracy theories. I am taking that off of their Wikipedia page. I think I avoided them for a bit because there was not a load of current interviews. However, they have just released their fourth studio album, viagr aboys. I am going to get to some recent interview with the band. However, for the first one, I am going back to late last year and an interview from NME:
“Viagra Boys have revealed to NME that they have a new album on the way, with its release expected “maybe next year”, according to frontman Sebastian Murphy.
The Swedish post-punk band met NME backstage at Reading Festival, with Murphy joined by the band’s bassist Henrik ‘Benke’ Höckert.
Viagra Boy’s previous album, 2022’s ‘Cave World’, saw them incorporate electronic elements into their sound, while its predecessor, 2021’s ‘Welfare Jazz’, bore a distinct country flavour. This time, explained Murphy, the band will include “a little bit of everything, hopefully”.
He added: “We’re gonna see where it ends up. I think there’s a little bit of all sorts of genres in there, hopefully – excluding maybe R&B and stuff like that.” With a laugh, he clarified: “There’s a lot of rock.”
When NME commented that it seems the Viagra Boys sound could go anywhere, Murphy replied: “Yeah, that’s kind of the vibe we want. We want people to not really expect what’s coming.
“And who knows? Maybe it does sound exactly like it has before, but in my head it doesn’t. Hopefully there are new sounds in there and we’ve definitely taken different approaches to songwriting.”
Höckert, describing the record, said: “It’s like the older stuff, but just a little bit better.”
In an interview earlier this year, Kings of Leon told NME that their latest recent album ‘Can We Please Have Fun’ was inspired by post-punk bands including Viagra Boys. Informed of this, Murphy exclaimed: “What! No way! That’s insane.”
Asked if Viagra Boys are KOL fans in return, Murphy replied: “I listened to them growing up a little bit. I mean, when I was 13, 14 – they were getting huge on radio and stuff like that. I didn’t know they were still making music.”
He added: “But that’s cool! That’s awesome. I can’t believe that, really. I wanna hear their new album and see if it sounds like Viagra Boys.” He then imitated his band’s signature guitar sound: “Der-ner-ner-ner-ner-ner-ner-ner!”
Last month, it was reported that Viagra Boys had engaged in a jokey online war of words with fellow Swedish band The Hives. On Instagram, the Hives dubbed Viagra Boys “punk rock losers”. In response, Murphy’s band shared a clip in which they called their supposed rivals “corporate suit rock”.
The joke was a means of publicising their appearances at Sthlm Fields Festival, which was held on July 6. In our interview, Murphy joked, “Fuck those guys!” before confirming: “I don’t wanna keep going – the beef is squashed!”
Conversely, ‘Cave World’ featured ‘Big Boy’, a collaboration with Sleaford Mods frontman Jason Williamson. Murphy told NME that Williamson is his “spirit animal – my British spirit animal”.
He added: “He’s very wise and I just look up to him a lot. I loved what he’s done with his music and his life, and I love how articulate he is and how angry he is. I just love the guy.”
Murphy teased ‘Cave World’ in a 2021 interview with NME, telling us that the band had recorded the album in “six days”. Now, though, he confessed this was untrue: “I must have been lying, trying to flex. Definitely not. There was a lot of back and forth, but everything changed substantially along the way. The whole process was probably over a year.”
Lana Del Rey is scheduled to release her country album, ‘Lasso’, next month, while Post Malone released his own country album, ‘F-1 Trillion’, on August 15. When NME pointed out to Viagra Boys that country music is having a moment and they were ahead of the curve with ‘Welfare Jazz’, Murphy replied: “Yeah, it is, right? That’s why we’re not doin’ it anymore!”
He then discussed his love of the genre, which was apparent in the band’s cover of John Prine’s ‘In Spite of Ourselves’, a collaboration with Amyl and the Sniffers’ Amy Taylor that appeared on ‘Welfare Jazz’.
“I’ve always been a huge country fan,” he said. “I listen to country every day. I wanted to incorporate it into our music before and then it’s like, ‘Oh, we’re kinda: ‘Been, there done that.’ We’ll see – it might come back [to us] someday”.
Although it may sound like I am pretty late to this particular party, the point of this feature is to highlight artists who might not be known to everyone. That deserve to be better know. Viagra Boys have a footing in the U.K. and are played by stations such as BBC Radio 6 Music. I really love what they are doing. Their latest album is among their best work. I am going to move to an interview with Viagra Boys’ Sebastian Murphy and Henrik Höckert:
“Waterboy’ – You’ve got the lyric in this song which says, “Congratulations on your new job.” What’s the worst job you’ve ever worked?
S: I worked at a Quiznos. It was like kind of like a Subway sandwiches place in California. It was my first job and it was absolutely horrible. Now, I can’t even go into a subway. It’s just the smell.
Did you quit or were you fired?
S: Fired, thank God
What did you do?
S: I was just bad at my job. I think I was bad at every job I’ve ever done. I’m just lazy and I’m a daydreamer. I’m just the worst employee. I’ve always been. I’ve had several people tell me this. The first tattoo shop I worked at, the guy told me I was the worst shop assistant he’d ever had.
B: I had a job here
S: In London?
B: In London, sorting mail in the night time.
Did you quit or were you fired?
B: I quit, yeah (laughs)
‘Store Policy’ – Tell me something you’ve stolen from a shop before that you still have? Or your biggest heist?
S: I used to steal all my clothes and then I got caught and I stopped doing it. But me and my buddies would just walk in places and get a big old pile of clothes. I don’t think I have any of those clothes anymore ‘cause I’m much fatter than I used to be. I used to be a small. Now I don’t really steal things anymore, to be honest, but you know.
Are you just saying that because it’s on record and you’re like, “I don’t steal anymore”.
S: I’m actually a lovely little boy. No, I’ll steal, I’ll steal an apple maybe.
Like scrumping!
S: Is that what it’s called? Is that why it’s called Scrumpy?
Yeah! What about you Benke? What’s your stealing stories?
B: I’d steal candy, that kind of stuff, candy and food and spray paint like graffiti. We’d take the spray cans.
Yeah, see, spray cans, that’s a cool answer.
S: I used to go to house parties in high school, and the first thing I would do was go to someone’s medicine cabinet and just steal all their medicine hoping that it would be something I could get high off. But once, I’m pretty sure it was my buddy Nick Hinman (he lives here in London). I’m pretty sure it was at his house, but I stole somebody’s dog’s cancer medicine and I don’t remember it. I was blackout drunk and then I woke up at my house and I had a bunch of missed calls and there was this guy like, “Hey man, did you steal my dog’s cancer medicine?”
I checked my jacket pockets and was like, “Ah yeah, that was me” (laughs). I hope the dog survived.
Shit. Did you give it back?
S: I gave it back for sure. I do care about dogs a lot.
B: Our friend stole a dog (laughs). On his way home, there was a car with a dog in it so he took one of the dogs. Then he came home as he lived outside Gothenburg and the police were already there.
S: The police knew it was him? (laughs)
B: Yeah, they knew it was him (laughs).
‘Medicine for Horses’ – At surface level, this song’s about a horse breaking your neck. What’s the worst injury you’ve ever had/have you ever broken any bones?
S: Yeah, I got I got ran over by a rollerblader in a skate park once and I broke both my wrists and I got a concussion and it was pretty bad. I squealed like a pig. Other than that, I’ve never had any real injuries, probably broken a rib. But I did that on purpose so I could, you know (laughs). No, but, yeah, just broken my wrist. What about you Benke?
B: Nope. Nothing!
Touch wood! ‘You Need Me’ – What’s one thing you need (recreationally) that you will never give up?
S: Beer. No, actually I need to give up beer! What do you mean by recreationally?
Something you can technically live without but you chose to do/take?
S: Video games. Or fast food.
Like Max’s in Sweden?
S: Eurgh, no. I like McDonalds. It’s one of the finest establishments.
B: I’d give up working out.
‘Best Show’ – What’s one TV show you love or loved?
B: Game of Thrones or The Wire.
S: I couldn’t watch The Wire. I thought it was boring, but I like this new show called Silo.
‘River King’ – If you could be king for a day, what is the first thing you’d change about the world or do?
S: I think I would hang a lot of politicians probably. Public hangings.
I think you’d have a lot of support with that as well.
S: And then I would probably introduce a strict socialist regime.
B: Put women in charge.
S: Yeah, and no one over 60 is allowed to be in office”.
I am going to end with a review of viagr aboys. Before that, The Guardian spoke with Sebastian Murphy last month. A band very much getting all this deserved buzz and hype, I do hope anyone who does not know about them checks them out. They are a fantastic band that continue to build on an army of fans:
“Viagra Boys’ 2018 debut single Sports was an addictively funny satire of hypermasculinity (their name drew from similar inspiration); their debut album Street Worms, released that year, railed against Sweden’s growing rightwing populism with wit and muscle. But the band’s steady rise has been built chiefly on relentless, riotous touring. Murphy, shirtless and tracksuit-trousered, stokes the crowd into rising levels of derangement – at their 2023 Glastonbury set, someone in the crowd was tossing their toddler into the air – as saxophone player Oskar Carls writhes around the stage in outrageously short shorts.
In an uptight world, a group dedicated to getting loose like this – so loose Murphy has the word tattooed on his forehead in Swedish – has major appeal: last year Viagra Boys played US arenas supporting Queens of the Stone Age. Their biggest world tour yet began this month at Coachella and will end 60 dates later at London’s Alexandra Palace. Murphy surmises that a lot of the fans “are just freaks, you know. Freaks recognise freaks. It’s freeing for a lot of people to see some dude that has clearly no muscles and is just letting his gut hang out have a good time.”
There was a time when Murphy wouldn’t get on stage without taking amphetamines first. But as his bandmates started having kids and settling down, the pace had to slow to remain sustainable. Murphy credits bassist and de facto bandleader Henrik “Benke” Höckert with gradually tightening things up. “I would always be so pissed off at him if he decided to stay sober for a tour,” Murphy says. “I was busy with doing drugs and thinking about myself; he was busy planning shit. Making it work as a viable source of income. Which would not be possible if we were fucked up every day.”
At the same time, the crippling hangovers and attendant anxiety started to become too much. “I still know how to party for sure,” says Murphy. “But I definitely know my limits now.” Drugs will never be entirely off the menu – “I can’t really help it when I’m on tour,” he admits – but these days he mostly sticks to beer (just the 30 or so a week). He goes to the gym and plays squash to try to stay in shape. He’s even stopped getting tattoos because he says he can’t take the pain any more. “These days if I stub my toe I’ll be crying for a week.”
In 2021, the band’s founding guitarist Benjamin Vallé died aged 47, shaking them all hard. They supported each other through the loss: where some men struggle to discuss difficult emotions, Viagra Boys have no such problem. “We talk to each other about everything,” says Murphy. I ask him if a newfound respect for death prompting him to change his lifestyle. He prefers to think of it as not wasting a good thing. “I’ve got a great fiancee, I’ve got an apartment,” he says. “I can afford things. Life is really easy and really good. I don’t want to fuck it up.”
His visual artist fiancee Moa Romanova, who did the artwork for their third album, 2022’s Cave World, has a studio next door to Shrimptech. At one point she drops in with their dog Uno – both are subjects of songs on Viagr Aboys. Uno II is a strange tale of conspiratorial anxiety seen through the eyes of an Italian greyhound with chronic dental problems. River King is a piano ballad in which Murphy croons with charming imperfection about Chinese takeaways and calming domesticity. It’s a disarmingly gentle end to the album: have Viagra Boys finally gone soft? Murphy smiles a gold-toothed grin. “We’ve always been soft. That’s been the problem all along”.
I am ending with a review for viagr aboys. One of the most urgent and incredible albums of the year, I would encourage everyone to listen to it. I am relatively new to Viagra Boys, but I feel like I have made up for some lost time. I will try and catch them live if I can at some point. They are simply phenomenal and they are getting all this success at the moment. Let’s hope that this continues for years to come:
“Viagra Boys’ previous full-length ‘Cave World’, a hyperactive and hilarious takedown of incels and conspiracy theorists, closed with enthusiastic instructions, courtesy of ‘Return To Monke’: “leave society, be a monkey.” While the track satirises the regressive worldviews of the aforementioned lost souls, in typically nuanced Viagra Boys fashion, it also acknowledges the widely felt appeal of abandoning society in a world where “everybody’s worried about the future”.
The Stockholm band’s latest album ‘viagr aboys’ sees them attempt to follow their own advice. According to frontman Sebastian Murphy, their fourth LP is a “simple and stupid” album, led from the off by the title’s linguistic chaos. He explained that “the whole political thing was exhausting”, implying that these 11 new tracks represent his lyrical voice turning inwards, away from socio-political madness and onto the simple stupidity of day-to-day existence.
However, much like how life today all-too-often feels, Viagra Boys’ new album is unable to ignore contemporary anxieties. Numerous tracks see Murphy set up a mundane, first-person situation, such as a trip to the vets on ‘Uno II’, or a health scare on ‘Pyramid of Health’, but digress into thoughtful, always-funny musings on western privilege and social media health fads, respectively.
Opening track and album highlight ‘Man Made Of Meat’ encapsulates Murphy’s contradictions. The punk-funk anthem features extraordinary lyrics that oscillate between hilarious and serious, arch and honest, and even personal and political. References to “your mum’s OnlyFans” are laugh-out-loud funny, but matched by lucid insights into modern-day malaise such as “if it was 1970, I’d have a job in a factory”.
Matching Murphy’s career-best lyrics are some of the rest of the band’s most eclectic compositions. The likes of the spacious ballad ‘Medicine For Horses’, the anthemic electro-rock of ‘Waterboy’ and indescribable jazz-punk of ‘Best In Show Pt.IV’ are evidence of a band as curious and contradictory as Murphy’s lyrics. They’re constantly searching, with similarly admirable zeal, for new ideas, but sometimes revert back to what they know best; manic, bass-lead, post-punk pit-starters in the form of ‘The Bog Body’ and ‘You N33D Me’.
The lush ‘Medicine For Horses’ surmises the very human complexities of ‘viagr aboys’. “Kiss my wife, tell her I love her,” Murphy croons, before confessing that “tell her she was the only thing that made me stop thinking about the plains, the great plains of North America.” Perhaps this is the simple and stupid philosophical truth that Viagra Boys are getting at: love is the only thing that will stop us losing our minds in the face of reality’s horrors”.
I am going to end it there. Go and check out Viagra Boys. A stunning band who are in a league of their own, viagr aboys is an album that everyone should have. I am a little late spotlighting the band, though there are people who have not heard of them, so I was keen to get this feature out now. Even if they are strong and have a solid fanbase, you know that Viagra Boys will continue to get…
BIGGER and better.
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