Messed!Up
When approaching the year-end list, my initial reaction was “Wait? Did I even listen to new music?” because I was certain the pandemic had driven me further down the road to nostalgia. I found myself reaching for music that was safe, the kind that I knew was predictable but satisfying. But the realization came that there were many amazing albums, especially EP’s, throughout this long, drawn-out year that had provided a reprieve from the misery and despair of the pandemic. And one of those EP’s is in fact connected to nostalgia and some great Swedish post-punk released a decade ago.
Returning back from Hamburg I found an EP called “Absolutes” in my post box, but I never really looked up the band’s name. As a magazine you get quite many albums, EP’s and singles but rarely have time to listen to it all although you want to, but after a nap I put it on the record player and some banger tunes came out of the speakers. After a quick look at the cover, I realized that one of Sweden’s finest post-punk acts were back – after a ten year long hiatus.
Formed already in 2002 Cut City released two great albums, “Exit Decades” and “Where’s The Harm In Dreams Disarmed”, with that chaotic insularity that defines the post-punk sound of the 80s. And then they just disappeared without a trace – until now.
After a few hours of “Absolutes” on high rotation and awakening some live memories of a show at Hafenklang ten years ago, we caught the last Gothenburg based band member Oskar Andersson and chat about growing up with American hardcore punk, being influenced by The Sound (not The Sounds), and returning to a scene where music and promotion have become digitized.
“We didn’t grow up with Joy Division”
It has been quite some time since Cut City made any noise in the scene. The last thing I remember was a gig at Hafenklang in Hamburg just before 2010 and then you disappeared from the scene.
That was a fun gig! We played a support slot for a hot British band called Bishops which no one remembers today (laugh), but that was it for us. Nothing happened after it, we didn’t play many shows after Hafenklang. It just happened like that, there wasn’t any conflict in the band or anything.
I guess we all grew tired of it and started doing other things in life. People had careers and started families, and everyone in the band except me left Gothenburg. Max [Hansson, the vocalist] did a few attempts to restart the band and pushed us like “I have a new song, let’s record it”, but no one was really up for it at the time. But he never gave up and two years ago his sent us songs that were like “Wow, this is good stuff” and we met up for the first time in years and rehearsed, and it just felt awesome to do these things together again.
Was it a break that just turned out longer than you expected or wasn’t it in the plans to restart at all?
I don’t think any of us thought we would restart, it didn’t feel like it when it all stopped around 2010, that was it. I’m sure most of us loved the idea of hanging out, listen to punk and have a few beers together, but it never really happened because families and jobs take a lot of time (laugh). You know, life happens and it’s hard as it is to get the time do everything you want to do.
What made you decide to get back together again?
It was time for it, time to release new music. When you have played in a band a very long time and released records and toured with your friends, you kind of miss it after a while. I did a few solo projects meanwhile and released records, but it wasn’t the same as doing something with your bandmates.
And it all came back to us when we met up for that night with beers, punk music and rehearsal; everyone felt like “This is it, let’s do it again”. It’s some sort of magic that only unfolds when you meet the right people, and it all ended up in “Absolutes”. At the moment we’re working on our third record, and it just feels so awesome to do it all again.
You’ve always had a distinct post-punk sound but a lot has happened with the genre in the last decade. You can hear influences of post-punk in all genres today and the whole scene has got wider attention.
Most definitely! That’s what I love with post-punk, it has migrated into indie rock, pop music and lots of other genres, you even find it in hip hop. There’s hip hop today that brings in the dark and emotional elements from post-punk and has rebranded the scene. It’s not all about flashing with money and guns anymore.
But personally I can’t let go of early punk and post-punk, that kind of music shaped me and how I write music.
You’ve always been compared to Joy Division although you have quite a different sound. Isn’t the Joy Division reference a bit problematic for a post-punk band?
Yeah, especially since we didn’t grow up with Joy Division but punk music, and not British punk but American punk bands. Max sent me a message on his most played song and it was a Descendents song. I grew up with music from early SST Records [American hardcore label] and bands like Black Flag and Hüsker Dü. That’s quite far off the British post-punk scene.
But sure, I love what Joy Division did because they achieved something that everybody wants, to reach out as teens and write music that really touches people. On top of that, they had a poet as a vocalist who had a remarkable talent for writing the perfect lyrics to their music. That made the band a lot bigger because they couldn’t play, it just sounds like shit. But that’s what I love about it, to have a feeling for music but not the technical skills to play the gear. That’s what made a band like Joy Division successful. You can’t copy that, it just appears in that moment when you have that sort of symbiotic relationship between music, lyrics, punk and context that Joy Division had when they started in the 70s.
What’s special with all those bands is that they never let the band become pigeonholed, they just did what they loved to do, but you can’t recreate it when you’re older. It’s just there in the moment when you’re young and have a fresh mind and is unaffected about everything around you. The context of the music is important.
Spotify can’t create a legacy
On Instagram Cut City reveal that they’re working on a third album tagged as “LP3”, nine years after the release of their latest album “Where’s The Harm In Dreams Disarmed”, and it will be released on physical media.
While streaming in general and Spotify, in particular, is good for a band like Cut City, the value of music gets lost if it’s only released on streaming services and in digital format, although it can cut some costs. For Oskar, the physical aspect of music has a greater value than ten million streams on Spotify.
When you returned to the scene this year it was with the ”Absolutes” EP, and you continue walking down the post-punk road. Is it a fresh start but with an old sound?
For me it’s a fresh start and many of the songs on “Absolutes” have been inspired by The Sound, a British 80s post-punk band no one remembers.
I don’t know why they never gained more attention while other post-punk bands did because for me they were the best band in the scene. When people ask about influences and we say The Sound they think it’s The Sounds [Swedish pop/rock band], but that’s as far from us as you can get (laugh). But just watch The Sound’s live shows on YouTube, they’re just so amazing on stage.
“Absolutes” is us paying respect to one of the greatest post-punk bands out there if you ask me.
I know from your posts on social media that you’re working on your third record. Will you release it DIY just like “Absolutes” or are you chasing a record label at the moment?
It depends on what we get from signing to a label. We can’t sign to a small label, then we’ll do it better ourselves, but if there’s a label big enough to push us forward and promote the band on a wider scale then we’ll sign up. It’s all about handing over the management role and have someone to do the time-consuming work of promotion.
We have so much fun together and have found a great way to work together, and if we need to release a record on our own it won’t be a problem. We’ve reached a point where we know what we’re good at and not. Max is a crappy guitarist but an awesome songwriter. He knows that we know that (laugh). It’s just awesome to write songs together with a genius like him, and whenever I get new songs from him I know I will love it 95% of the time. But he’s not the Yngwie Malmsteen kind of guitarist (laugh).
We all have our roles, but what is most important is that we never had any fights like most bands have after some years together.
But what makes it different to restart the band ten years later? Spotify hadn’t peaked at all when you went on a break and bands had yet to discover how they could use social media for promotion. Is it a completely different scene today?
That’s what happened, the world has become digital but we still want to release LP’s. Just imagine if you only release your music digitally and have ten million streams, and then Spotify disappears. What’s the value of your ten million streams then? You have nothing to show the world, no legacy at all. The band is basically erased from the music history if you haven’t released anything on physical media. With vinyl releases you have a legacy.
It’s kind of boring to watch all young bands just releasing digital albums. It’s a great feeling to hold the record in your hands and physically pull it out of the cover. I know that my kids don’t share that thought, but to my generation of musicians it’s important.
Lots of other things have also changed since our most active band period. We were kind of good on working on our MySpace page around 2004, which probably sounds like the Stone Age by now (laugh). We were young back then and had ambitions on what we wanted to achieve, but we also kept to our genre and didn’t really want to explore anything outside of it. Today I feel free to work with any kind of influence I want to. It doesn’t matter how many streams we get on Spotify, there will always be people who like our music.
I think Spotify’s algorithm is quite fair. You can have opinions on the owner structure and their power in the music industry, but it’s a fair system that prioritizes streams, shares and playlists. One person who really loves one of your songs can actually make a difference for a small band like us even if we’re a band with a moderate number of streams, but it gives us a boost to continue to do what we do best: music. Every year when you get the summary from Spotify, there’s always someone writing “You were my most streamed band this year” or “You wrote my most streamed song”. That means something.
The new music industry offers you a lot of places for promotion that we didn’t have around 2010, but we don’t use many of them. We have Soundcloud for sharing demos between us in the band. It happened by accident that we made one demo song public and some guy from Italy listened to it like fifteen times (laugh). But the rest isn’t something we’re super interested in. We’re not super active on Facebook and just have a few thousand followers, and Instagram didn’t really exist when we left the scene in 2010 and there’s barely anyone following us (laugh).
If you would get a chance to tour Europe again, let’s say after you release your third record, would that be an option for this new edition of the band?
Of course it would be great to hang out all four of us together for two weeks but it depends on how we do it. It’s a bit about money and a lot about travel arrangements. Driving between venues for ten hours is just unbearable today. I can’t do it like that anymore, at least not for months, just a few weeks. When we were young it wasn’t a problem to sleep on a floor somewhere, wake up and still be drunk at 6 am and then go to the next place, but we’re more comfortable today and need hotel rooms (laugh).
But it would be great to tour with your best friends, have a beer for breakfast and play music in the evening. You can’t do that anymore, not when you have a family. Well, you can but you don’t have the energy for it (laugh).
Photographer: Krichan Wihlborg
Cut City pages
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