Driven by a DIY ethos: INVSN interviewed

If you have your roots in Sweden you should know about the INVSN. If you’re raised on punk and hardcore and all those amazing records generated in Sweden’s most creative region Umeå far up in the north, then you have seen the band members on major stages across the world in different band setups.

A beautiful autumn evening in October they visited Hamburg on their never-ending tour of their latest album “The Beautiful Stories” but with the addition of the 2018 EP “Forever Rejected”, and we took the opportunity to sit down with frontman Dennis Lyzxén and drummer André Sandström to talk about a band going slowly in the right direction and the conditions for being a musician in the digital age.

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I was a member of the first pirate generation and when I first arrived at my university studies in 1997 I had never heard of an mp3. By the end of my first term I had filled my one-gigabyte hard drive with hundreds of bootlegged songs and at graduation day, I had two hundred-gigabyte drives, all full and all made possible by frequently using Napster, Kazaa and many similar peer-to-peer networks.

What I didn’t understand although I at the time already had worked professionally in the music industry for several years – and still would work a few more years – was how much this online behavior would contribute to completely change the music industry, a digital disruption going beyond what anyone believed was possible and that not only affected the record labels but also the musicians, who were worse off than ever after music turned into digital freeware.

While the Recording Industry Association of American (RIAA) argued that 30 billion songs had been pirated in the years 2005-2010, several research reports claim that the vast majority of the downloaders would never had purchased the music in the first place. Increased exposure due to piracy might even help artists by allowing new fans to discover their work. That was the argument of the time, more exposure would in the end help bands and artists out even if it involved giving away hard work for free.

Internet for sure brought with it great opportunities for musicians, above all they increased their control over content creation and distribution of their work but it came with some huge downsides as well; fans copied music without paying a dime, saturated live markets and less paid for gigs, and disloyal fans when there’s too much music to listen to.

Although I’ve listened to the INVSN already from their album debut ”Hela Världen Brinner” [roughly translated into “The Whole World is Burning”] in 2010, and even more after they released their self-titled and mind-blowing third album – you can even chose between a Swedish and an English version – and should pay most attention to their musical development, the reason for my recent interest took its start in an Instagram/Facebook post by frontman Dennis Lyxzén, addressing the problems surrounding music work in the 2000s.

And Lyxzén and Sandström have been around since early nineties and have band résumés earning them a place at the highest step on the band ladder, thus they know how music work has changed over the years.

Consequently, the interview starts in the changing conditions for musicians in general and how these changes have affected how they work with the band.

The death of an industry as we knew it

I really have to start in your Instagram post, Dennis, about the struggle artists face today with lots of work and very little pay, if you get anything at all – that really intrigued me. 25 years ago Ace of Base sold 18 million copies of their debut album, today that would be impossible. What has happened?
Dennis: I’ve just read the Kee Marcello-book [guitarist in eighties rock band Europe] of all books you can read (laughs) but it’s great tour reading, and he writes that when Europe released their last album – I don’t remember the name of it since I wasn’t a huge Europe fan – and went on tour, and got the news about really bad record sales he writes “We only sold 800 000 copies and then we knew it was the end of the band” (laughs). You had to split up because you only sold 800 000 copies (laughs)! Hilarious!

Times were different, that’s for sure.

How would you describe the changes of the industry, especially the changes affecting you as musicians? I mean you’ve been doing this for more than 25 years and in several bands making it onto the bigger scenes and probably have had to face quite many changes.
Dennis: On the positive side is that music is accessible everywhere, and that’s great of course. There’s a great opportunity to be the master of your life as well; if you’re good at manipulating social media you can do a lot for your band, but this is also on the negative side. If you’re old-school people and used to just make a record and then go on tour, it might be negative if you’re not good at promoting yourself in social media – and we’re not good at it.

Also, when music is accessible everywhere it means that all music is accessible everywhere, and it’s easy to disappear in the crowd of bands out there. You need to find balance between these aspects, consider how you can use it and not make it into a burden.

But don’t you find it provoking that people seem to think that musicians have a good life making millions off their music from doing a few shows and then spend the rest of the time in the sofa? The reality is rather the contrary; never-ending touring just to get some kind of income, making new songs while being on tour to record when you arrive at home just to be able to get out on the road again.
Dennis: We’re facing that kind of challenge every day because everyone in the band has normal jobs and it’s a bloody difficult struggle to make any kind of plans. We’ve done something like a hundred shows with this album [”The Beautiful Stories”] in one and half year meaning that we tour quite much. Very often we do these two-week tours in Germany, get back home on Sunday evening and on Monday morning you [turning to André] and Sara [the bassist] go to work, almost directly after arrival. It’s really difficult to get anything to work out.

We’ve done this for quite a while now and are not that young anymore but that rather makes it even more amazing that we’re still doing it. Sure, it still happens that we come home and think “Ok, we didn’t earn anything this time either” but we still do it; release new albums, tour and do the whole thing, just like jumping into the van and drive to Sundsvall [app. 300km south of Umeå] and play in front of fifty people and then back home again – but we still do it!

Most musicians are unable to continue because the conditions for doing it are horrible.

That’s kind of interesting; a few months ago we interviewed in Hamburg and they said that the INVSN are role models in that respect. You turned up in Vancouver a Tuesday night and played a crowd of thirty but did a show like it was a full house.
Dennis: Great to hear! They’re friends of ours and we hanged out with them in Vancouver.

But the point is that you always have to do your best!

André: That’s our attitude and we’ve always been like that, there’s no difference whether you play in front of thirty people or a thousand. And when you do something you love to do, why do a bad show?

Dennis: But I also believe that people can be too fucking spoiled; we’ve been touring a long time and I have experienced a sold-out Terminal 5 [New York venue] two nights in a row, and then you end up in Vancouver a Tuesday night with thirty sold tickets – but don’t forget that those people that turned up did it because of you.

Sometimes bands play shorter sets just because they didn’t sell enough tickets or skip the small talk between songs just to finish it off quicker, but they forget that those attending the show have bought a ticket to see them play. You can be mad at the rest of Vancouver for being assholes for not turning up but those at the venue deserve all respect.

Although I’ve been doing this for a very long time now I can’t take it for granted; every night is about proving yourself and that you deserve to be on that specific stage, because there’s too many who don’t deserve it. Every fucking night that’s what we think! We have to prove that we’re worth the ticket they pay for. It’s bloody important not to forget that.

But do you think it ever again will be possible to live off music in the modern music industry as it works out today or will we return to something similar to the nineties where the output of music was limited but artists made money off their music?
Dennis: I think that it will be possible to live off music in periods but it’s also about what you are prepared to sacrifice in life. If your goal is set for two grand a month it won’t be possible. If we release a new album and everything is lined up around us, then we can say “Let’s do this for eight months”, and get completely immersed in it during that period.

Even in The (International) Noise Conspiracy where we lived off music and did loads of gigs, everyone had temporary jobs. You came home from touring and worked three weeks or a month and then we were out again. I definitely think you can live like that in the future as well.

André: Totally, just like a touring cycle where you can live off music during a certain time span, but I find it hard to believe that you will be able to earn enough money to have an easy life, you will have to work (laughs).

Dennis: To make it work out with the INVSN we have a mindset like “If we book a bedroom for six instead of three double rooms we’ll save a grant”, and then we do it. We do very much on our own like the merch and the records; the labels distribute our records and as soon as the first press is sold-out we’re like “Then we pay for a second press”. That’s more into the DIY direction but it also makes things work out.

With your background on the hardcore scene which is known for its DIY approach to music, I guess you must have much experience of working like that?
Dennis: That’s true and it’s also part of everything we do. Of course the label and a lot of people around us do stuff, but because you come from this DIY ethos you do lots of work on your own. If we do it ourselves the result will be like we want it.

André: In the beginning, just like when we toured the US in 2014, it was great to have people around us taking care of things and telling us “We’ll fix this, you don’t need to do anything” and we were like “Finally! Someone else does it for us and we don’t need to deal with everything for once”, but it was a complete disaster, we didn’t have control of anything!

You didn’t see any money, you didn’t have the faintest idea of how much merch was printed or the cost of if, and after the tour you just got this message “This is your debt”.

Dennis: We did 110 shows with the latest album, toured quit much, and we felt ”It’s going slowly in the right direction” and then our management called us to say ”Ok, your losses this year is 25 000 [US dollar]”. Sure, we had afforded us small salaries but nothing you could live off really, and after this disaster we decided to go back to the DIY path and count every cent and discuss every money-related decision like “Can we do this?”.

When you tour Germany many clubs have their own apartments and we always say ”It’s fine for us, let’s do it”; we’re not posh people! But to make it work out you really need to do it yourself.

But isn’t it also a loyalty issue today? With your individual résumés as members of quite well-known bands, the INVSN should easily get much attention but it seems to me that you’re one of those bands that don’t make use of it. Did you feel that you have restarted from the bottom?
Dennis: That’s probably true, at least we noticed quite early that what we’ve done in other bands doesn’t really help the INVSN. When we released our latest album and the label used that just to promote us, old hardcore fans came up to us and said “This is not what we expected” and those who like post-punk and indie was like “Is this some kind of hardcore dudes? We’re not interested in that”, and we ended up in between fans (laughs).

We have been really careful to not push for the connection to Refused and just want to get attention for what we do in the INVSN, even if it means that you have to restart the process of proving you’re good enough.

We’re playing the Autumn Moon Festival tomorrow and played there already last year, but we got that gig just because our booker knows the organizers. Nobody knew anything about us and we played the last slot of the night after this huge German eighties electronic band, the headliner of the festival, the worst possible slot you can get.

Right after our show the festival got back to us and just said “You’re playing here next year as well, this was the best I’ve ever seen. Where do you come from? What kind of band are you? Are you from the pop scene?” and I just said “Not really, we’re just old punks”, and they booked us directly to this year as well (laughs). Tomorrow we play just before Fields of the Nephilim.

As I said, things a slowly going in the right direction for us (laughs).

Lagging behind their own ambitions

For someone new to the INVSN and who starts by listen to their albums chronologically, it will probably be like an Easter egg for every new album: never-ending surprises.

Sonically the band have evolved substantially; much influenced by traditional Swedish punk on their debut “Hela Världen Brinner” and singing in Swedish, to dark post-punk influences on their latest album “The Beautiful Stories” and English lyrics. And their latest EP “Forever Rejected” released in March this year has even been described as a “modern take on Nick Cave”.

That leads us to the question in what direction the INVSN will take in the future.

What I find really interesting is that when bands get some sort of breakthrough they usually move to bigger cities where it’s much easier to stay in touch with people on different music scenes. But you have stayed in Umeå, why is that?
Dennis: Well, maybe you can explain that André who’s just about to move to Stockholm (laughs), try to get out of this one!

André: A very tricky question at this point (laughs) but I blame it on love, I move because of a relationship, there’s no other reason for it. There’s never been a good argument for me to move to another city; Umeå has all these creative contexts and is always moving forward.

Dennis: Most definitely. Something very important for us as a band is distance and being close. What does it take for me to walk over to your apartment [turning to André]? Two minutes? And to Sara it takes ten minutes and to our studio fifteen. That’s really different in a major city where you need to plan everything, ”Do you want to meet up in the studio? Well, let’s meet in an hour then”.

Umeå is of the size where you know everybody but it’s big enough to allow for a lot of things to happen.

Personally it became this thing for me when everybody started to tour in the nineties and they moved to Stockholm, just like Fireside did. I really believe that a creative region as Umeå deserve a great cultural life. It’s just too fucking easy to move away and sit in Stockholm saying “Oh, I really love Umeå” and I can be like “You lived in Stockholm the last twenty years, stop talking about Umeå”.

I felt a responsibility to show everyone that you can live in Umeå, tour across the world and release albums worldwide, and that’s also good for the city. Culture has to exist everywhere, not only in Stockholm.

But it becomes quite visible when things change in Umeå; there can be many great bands for a while and then two guys move away and four bands disappear (laughs), and everything has to restart again but that’s how it is to live in a small city. But I’ve always been driven by the thought that culture has to be allowed to exist everywhere, there has to be these zones and hubs where things happen.

It never ever intrigued me to move to Stockholm or London, I find it more comfortable to live in Umeå. And you have to think of how our lives turned out; we tour a lot. We’re probably in Hamburg two or three times a year and although it’s a great experience to be here it’s also great to come back home to this very creative small city that Umeå is.

But sure, I can be tired of things at times. We don’t have a great venue in Umeå at the moment but it will get better just because it is a small city. It’s enough if someone open a small venue and book a few bands for everything to restart again.

We’ve had a few good venues before; one was Scharinska, an amazing venue where you ended up at least three times a week and everyone into music were there, a great meeting spot, but they had to close down after they changed owner. There was this punk venue called Verket, just like Kafé 44 [classic punk venue in Stockholm] but in Umeå, but they couldn’t stay in that place. As I said, you don’t need much for everything to change in a small city.

And another thing; never underestimate what it means to be isolated as you are in a city as Umeå far up north in Sweden, there’s a lot of time to think about music, to write music and to record music because there’s not much else to do. I have many friends moving to Stockholm that were “too big” for Umeå when they moved away and when you ask them “What happened with the new album you were about to record” and nothing happens. There’s too many distractions in Stockholm.

I don’t say it’s always like this but to live in Linköping or Umeå and you ask yourself “What the fuck am I going to do during the winter season” the answer is kind of simple, “Rehearse” (laughs).

Speaking of music; your sound has evolved a lot since your first kind of poppy album with bits and pieces of typical Swedish punk music in it to turn into the post-punk direction. Did it happened organically or was it by purpose?
André: Psychologically we’ve always been one record behind meaning that when we released our debut our ambition was for it to sound like the second album, and when the second record came out we wanted it to sound like the third (laughs). We haven’t manage to evolve in the same speed us our ambitions.

Dennis: The first record is kind of an Ebba Grön inspired album [Swedish eighties punk band] (laughs).

André: We thought it would sound more post-punk but it just became pop punk of everything (laughs).

Dennis: But we copped out as well; we did a few post-punk songs but didn’t feel comfortable about it. When you have a background like us, on the punk scene, and you have created some sort of a music comfort zone, we always go back to our punk roots and speed up the songs if it sounds weird to us, and the first record suffer much from that kind of thinking. We really wanted to do something new but it was more comfortable to be pop punky, and just as André says we’ve always lagged behind our ambitions.

A problem for us today is that if someone see us live and listens to the first album they’ll think ”Ok, this is punk” but they will be quite surprised about the sound a few albums later. That’s just how you do it yourself when you see a band and think “Great! I know what this is” and the band make three albums, you see them again and think “Fuck, this is not what I expected at all”. That’s our problem as well, at least in Sweden where quite many think they know what the INVSN do until they see us live and think “Hey, that’s not really the same thing as on record” (laughs).

André: We have for sure evolved a lot between albums.

I was thinking about that in the context of your latest EP ”Forever Rejected” and that it goes in yet a new direction.
André: Our ambition has always been to face the challenge and not paint ourselves into a corner and become a band stuck in a genre although we may end up in a certain genre by the way we express our music. The point is that we dare to do those changes you’re not comfortable with from the beginning.

Dennis: And that’s our guiding light; as soon as something sounds ”This is really uncomfy” we record it (laughs), and we push ourselves to do it. If our second album would have been a massive hit, it would have been easy to end up in a comfort zone and continue doing that kind of music people expect you to do. But we have always been like “Ok, the last album did well” and pushed ourselves into a new direction and not thinking of what people want to hear from us.

We’re just in the writing process of a new album and hopefully it will be released in the autumn of 2019, and we’re really open-minded at the moment and try everything out. Let’s see where it ends up musically.

About comfort zone; Lana del Rey isn’t what you associate the INVSN with but you made a great cover of “Love” on the EP. What brought you to the idea of covering Lana del Rey?
Dennis: It’s just an amazing song! It all started with a session at Swedish radio, and one of the thing with that show was to cover someone on the charts and we thought “That’s impossible” but our tour manager Robin came up with an idea and said “Have you listened to the new Lana del Rey single yet?” and we thought it was kind of cool and just did it.

For us it was also about doing something more contemporary; usually when bands do covers they always come up with some thirty-year old stuff and we just thought it would be cool to cover a completely new song.

It also gave us the idea that “This may be something we need to do more”, maybe not Lana del Rey but that type of slow songs.

André: We get a lot of our influences from new music, actually everything in music. But in the end we know that we never will lose our live energy and it will be quite clear that we’re old punks even if we do something with more electronics in it or something very poppy, it will be powerful in the end.

Dennis: There’s this dude in Australia who’s putting together a The Sound compilation, the old UK band, and we’re doing a cover to that one as well.

In general it’s fun to do covers as long as you put your imprint on them. We’re not going to turn into a cover act but it is fun to make some surprising decisions at times.

Facing the struggles of social media promotion

New technologies are making it easier than ever for musicians to create, distribute and promote music – and also to make money doing so. At least that’s what we’ve learned in media.

Mike Masnick, who ran the blog Techdirt in the nineties and was one of the most enthusiastic supporters of a free Internet, encouraged artists to “stop worrying” and to use social media and blogs to directly “connect with fans” and then give them some product or experience that added enough “value” to get consumers to pony up. This could involve selling merchandise, concert tickets, artist face-time, or even the right to contribute to an artist’s recording.

And compared to the past when the music business was a lottery and only a very small number of artists made any money at all, more musicians than ever would make money, and they could do it without worrying about copyright or licensing. Social media is the solution to everything, the universal cure that makes music life much easier – if it just weren’t for that tiny sell-out feeling that comes with it.

Everyone touts the idea of social media saving the broke musician from the marketing efforts of the major labels. Sure, social media is a big deal for musicians and really well managed social media accounts can launch music careers. It’s been done.

The flip side of connecting with fans via social media is the concept of becoming internet famous. That means that you build up a really strong social media following, that people are talking about you and you’re not making a single penny from your music. The sad reality is that just because people are sharing your viral video does not mean that they are buying tickets to your shows.

This battle, to become trapped by the Internet, is present in everyday life in a bands as the INVSN as well but it’s also a conflict between how you want to represent yourself and your band, and the risk to appear as a sell-out.

To wrap things up and go back to where we started; I know that social media have come to play an increasingly important role in reaching out to people, especially if you’re doing it all in a DIY fashion. Is this the biggest challenge today, to face the pressures of social media?
André: I was extremely uncomfortable with it from the beginning and the pressures from our booking agency, the management and our label saying “You have to get better on social media”, and they put that pressure on Dennis who came back to the band saying “Come on guys, we have to get better”.

Dennis: When you come from Västerbotten [northern region in Sweden] you want it to be enough with the music you do. Today I think that the INVSN are much better in social media, I feel good about it, but just like André says it’s very much about pushing yourself into the spotlight and say “Look at me, look at me”, and Swedes from the north are really not like that. It’s more like “Let’s go on tour”, and that’s enough for us (laughs).

I will never feel it as a natural part of me and I don’t really have that kind of sell-out behavior in my DNA.

Sometimes I get the impression that modern musicians work more with the administration of social media than the creative side of music.
Dennis: Absolutely! At the same time, if people are great at it, it’s an asset for the band but you have to find that kind of balance where it’s fun and you do it because you want it. But it’s bloody difficult to find that balance and not feel that you’re a sell-out; that balance has to be based on “What do we represent and what kind of band are we”, just like how much we can push for an upcoming tour or a new EP.

It’s quite obvious that a personal post on Insta is more popular than a post about a tour or a gig. That was the main point with my very long text in my Insta post, that musicians as a collective has to help each other and “like” each other posts – and I got thousands of likes for it (laughs). Three days later when I posted our tour dates it was hardly noticed.

But it’s also part of how society evolves; you can sit in your corner and whine about things or you do the best you can and still try your hardest to get known for the music. We really believe we’re a great band and think that “The next album will be even better”, and it slowly goes in the right direction.

We talked about this earlier today that we’ve been doing this for such a long time and had those really great periods, but we still have the mindset that we have to work hard and that kind of attitude is good to have. You have to prove yourself and learn to stay strong when there’s setbacks – and where really good at handling setbacks (laughs).

André: That’s something we’re bloody good at (laughs)! We never been that kind of band ending up at the lowest step of the ladder but have never been hyped either or had the fortune to turn up at that perfect moment where you get bigger than you really are. It has never been a downward spiral, just a slow walk upwards a slightly inclining slope (laughs).

If it’s because of social media? No, it’s because we’re a bloody good band (laughs).


Photographer interview: ©Jule Rog
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About J.N.

Music researcher with an unhealthy passion for music and music festivals. Former studio owner, semi-functional drummer and with a fairly good collection of old analogue synthesizers from the 70's. Indie rock, post rock, electronic/industrial and drum & bass (kind of a mix, yeah?) are usual stuff in my playlists but everything that sounds good will fit in.
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