More about: Viagra Boys

If Viagra Boys can teach us anything - other than the comedic value of a wayward shrimp mention - it’s that you really needn’t take everything so damn seriously. The Swedish band have been hammering the point home for nearly five years now with their absurdist genre-scrambling sounds - and they continue to do so with their second album Welfare Jazz, which is out this Friday (8 January).

So far on the album's campaign trail, we’ve had a baffling pair of music videos for lead singles ‘Ain’t Nice’ and ‘Creatures’, plus some Aussie-gatecrashing country fodder with an Amyl and the Sniffers feature on the gross’n’adorable John Prine cover ‘In Spite Of Ourselves.’ On Friday's release, there's far more of that to come. The best part? No matter what nonsense Viagra Boys throw at the wall, it sticks.

Sure, some of the guys in this absurdist outfit are trained jazz musicians, but it doesn’t inform what they make, only how well they play it. “I don’t think we have any conscious decisions really,” American/Swedish frontman Sebastian Murphy tells us through the yawns of a man who has clearly just woken up, “the album was just us playing music we think is fun.” “When I write I just write…whatever comes to me at the time,” he adds. The result is an album filled with Dadaist references to Blues-spewing men hopping away from relationships like toads, canine conspiracy theorists (“I think he’s lived another life”) and shrimps going “blub blub blub.”

As a finished entity though, Welfare Jazz doesn’t come out quite as random as you might expect. “It usually ends up having a wholeness to it,” Murphy admits, “due to the fact certain periods of my life have a theme going on.” One such theme, much plumbed on the new LP, is that of renegade outsiders living bittersweet (but largely bitter) lives: conscious or not, it’s evident in the heavy, downtrodden bass on ‘Into The Sun’, a consistent inability to commit, and the gallows humour on ‘Creatures’. Of the latter single, Murphy tells us “it’s a song I wrote coming out of a certain lifestyle that I used to live. I used to be a heavy speed addict and hung out with a lot of creatures: people that had given up on life and just went around collecting electronics.”

‘I Feel Alive’ carries some of the same insinuations: “it’s from the perspective of someone in a loop, like maybe just laying around doing drugs all day and barely ever feeling alive. But when you do it’s like ‘oh my god this is amazing’. It’s more that you’re not alive whatsoever, you know?”

No longer a speed addict, Murphy spends his days writing with Viagra Boys and inking blackwork designs at Stockholm Classic Tattoo. During the pandemic he’s also made time for gaming - Squad, Cyberpunk and Breath of the Wild - though he’s also been able to get out and see friends considering Sweden has had one of the most open Covid policies in the world. “[The policy is] just have a little bit of common sense, stay away from old people and hang out with the same friends - which is what I’ve been doing. It’s been good because I’ve had a lot of time for hobbies: it’s been relaxed. I feel really bad for everyone else who’ve been in total chaos.”

Though freer than many of us have been in the past nine months, Covid-19 did still manage to affect the release of Welfare Jazz: the album was finished over a year ago and was supposed to land in summer 2020. The synth-tastic Common Sense EP which we received instead in March 2020, presented a clutch of songs that escaped genre completely - pushing further away from the Post-Punk labels the group had been collecting since the release of their debut album Street Worms - and its mega-hit ‘Sports’ - in 2018.

As you'll soon hear, there are many parallels between the Common Sense EP and Welfare Jazz, and that's because both releases were recorded in one monster session: “and we recorded seven other songs that haven’t come on the album,” Murphy tells us, “maybe they’ll come up in the future on a deluxe version...”

Now with added synth, jazzier overtones and a penchant for country, the Viagra Boys way with the absurd has carried over onto this new record, though like on the underbelly anthems that eulogise on Murphy’s past life, some other seemingly random subjects also emerge from real life occurences. The obsession with dogs and dog shows is not only a fruitfully bizarre world to pull from, but a lived experience: “I used to go to dog shows when I was younger with my dad - I don’t know why. I think we just did it because it was weird.” The shrimp theme - which particularly thrives across the Viagra Boys’ social media - comes from an old obsession that references the smell of amphetamines (“it makes your dick the size of a shrimp also”, Murphy told us in 2019), while the many country inspirations lead from Murphy’s lifelong love of the genre. “If I could decide, I would probably make an entire Country album” he tells us.

That last wish does at least figure in full on album closer and cover ‘In Spite of Ourselves’, a John Prine tribute in collaboration with friend Amy Taylor of Amyl and the Sniffers. “I didn’t know too much about [Prine] until I heard that song, and then we recorded it and two weeks later he died. Total bummer. Since then I’ve listened to him a lot,” Murphy says, adding that all it took to onboard Amy in the duet was a dm on Instagram. Pushed back so as not to appear opportunistic following Prine’s death (from complications relating to Covid-19 in April), the cover recently got its ramshackle green screen video, fruits of a shoot carried out while “getting wasted.”

All told, Welfare Jazz is a daring, complex and deliciously weird accomplishment - even if Viagra Boys only intended to write what felt fun. Much like 2018 debut Street Worms, it’s an album that wriggles out of classification and plays with satirical absurdity in order to talk about alternative lifestyles, and sometimes to talk about nothing in particular at all. Above all, Viagra Boys have made a confident record, a feat that reflects the place Murphy has reached in his own life. "There was a lot more proving yourself when you're younger. It was more important that other people knew who I was, but now I know who I am and I don’t really give a shit what other people think. I don’t want to conform to normal society but I don’t have a problem hanging out with people that do."

Welfare Jazz arrives 8 January via Year0001.

More about: Viagra Boys