Messed!Up
Like many other sectors, the music industry has been significantly affected by COVID-19, with notably severe impacts on live music thus affecting bands’ and artists’ chances to reach out to an audience with music they’ve released in pandemic times.
Just like bands releasing music during the first months of 2020 to catch the opportunity to promote the record at local venues before the festival season starts, Gothenburg indie act Damen released their debut album Sagrada Familia and were looking forward to the year ahead of them – and two weeks later COVID-19 struck the world.
Without the touring piece of the puzzle in place, it has been hard to reach out and get that extra push for the album. But rather than ending up all depressed of a lost opportunity, Damen started to record new songs with the target to release a new album in 2021. However, the arrival of the second lockdown last fall stopped the band from meeting up in the studio and at the same time guitarist Gustav broke his hand, and second album ambitions ended up in the recently released five-song EP Unemployment, Broken Bones, Death, Baby, named after the struggles the band been through since the release of their debut album.
Messed!Up met up with three of the four band members at Fyrens Ölkafé in Gothenburg and chat about facing the challenges of a pandemic, their nineties indie influences, and how they struggle to name their songs and records.
A year of frustration
Congratulations on your new EP. Does it represent the frustration of not being able to tour your debut album or was it something you already had in the works and had planned to release?
Thanks! It’s a little bit of both actually. We had a few songs that we wanted to release anyway, but at first our intention was to record a second album. But we released the EP because we were frustrated that nothing happened when we got stuck trying to write a full album. We had the songs on the EP and wanted to write and record five more, but our rehearsal space closed with the lockdown in the fall and Gustav broke his hand. That was a huge bummer.
These songs were done not long after we released the album and we knew it would take us at least half a year to write another five songs to complete a full album, and if you consider the whole process around recording, releasing and distributing a record, adding to the struggles of dealing with a pandemic, it would have taken us at least a year before we had a new album out and that’s a very long time. It would have been Sagrada Familia [debut album] all over again.
Sagrada Familia is called like that because, like the basilica in Barcelona, it took us forever to finish it (laugh). We started to record the album in the fall of 2018, released a few singles during the spring 2019 and did some shows, like The Great Escape in Brighton, and then went back into the studio, and then we released the album in February last year, just two weeks before the lockdown – two years of hard work that in the end didn’t pay off at all (laugh).
But we had the album ready for a release way before February last year but ended up in label struggles. VÅRØ Records wasn’t on the table yet, there was another label that was super excited about releasing the album, but nothing happened at all and we had to wait another six months before we signed with VÅRØ. We even had a release party for the single “Americana” in the fall of 2019 which should have been the album release party (laugh).
Unemployment, Broken Bones, Death, Baby doesn’t really feel like something positive. Does the title of the EP reflect your experiences during the pandemic?
Yeah, that’s what it is about. First, we were like “Ok, what will happen to all the work we’ve put into our debut album? That’s worth nothing now”. Then Adrian lost his job, a friend of David passed away and some of us got kids, probably the only good thing that happened (laugh).
The EP was supposed to have been recorded three months earlier and if that would have happened we probably would’ve had time to write the last five songs as well, but then Gustav slipped on the way to work and got a fracture in his hand (laugh). Let’s just say that last year was a real mess.
But we didn’t pick the title to summarize a bad year by purpose, we’re just not good at coming up with names or titles and always make those decisions the last thing we do, and then it becomes something that represents what we’ve been through since the last time we released a record. But it’s also a great way of doing it because you will remember what happened while we were recording that particular record, and this time it just happened to be a lot of crappy stuff (laugh).
But does the EP take you in a new direction or is it an extension of your debut album?
Not really, it sounds pretty much like the album because we haven’t changed how we write music much. But the EP is catchy, we’ve learned how to write music with hooks. Many of the songs on the album, and most of the music we wrote before the album, don’t have a real chorus. The bridge was the chorus, that was the best part of a song, and the chorus didn’t add anything to the song. Just listen to ”I’ll Be Waiting For It” on Sagrada Familia; the lyrics in the bridge start with something like “He said…” and when the chorus arrives you’ll think “Ok, was that the chorus?” (laugh). That’s what we call an anti-chorus today (laugh).
But the biggest change on the EP is that our producer Robert [William-Olsson] stepped up the production quite much and did an awesome job. When he produced Sagrada Familia it was one of his first bigger jobs and he has gained more experience since the album was recorded and has really pushed the overall sound to a higher level – the drum sound is just amazing. We would love to continue working with him in the future as well.
The Sagrada Familia work process was also much slower and it could take us six months to finish a song; it would be half done after a few weeks but we didn’t finish it until much later. When working with the EP we had a much better workflow and speeded up the whole writing process, just like fitting the puzzle pieces together a lot quicker this time.
You also get the impression that the sound is more consistent, like having a common theme, when you do all the songs within a shorter time span.
Most definitely, and that was also the reason we released an EP because if we would wait another six months for writing five more songs to have a new album ready, it would be a huge risk that the overall sound of the album wouldn’t have a common theme. It will sound like we’ve written those songs at different times and people won’t really understand what Damen’s music is about (laugh). And aside from getting a too diverse album, waiting with releasing these songs would also put pressure on us that we have to put them on the next album. What if they won’t fit with the new music? That would be a risk and a lost opportunity if we just keep them bagged.
We also started working on the EP just right after we had released the album last year and it’s a perfect time to release it now. Now we can have a fresh start and let our music evolve a bit until the next release.
Not a TikTok band
Inspired by the indie rock sound of the late 90s and early 2000s, Damen set off on their own journey in 2015 inspired by bands like The Strokes, War On Drugs, and Arcade Fire to mention a few. Although those influences were more obvious on Damen’s earlier releases, they still keep some inspiration, especially in their working titles while their songs mature and take shape in the studio.
However, the indie rock scene is slowly fading away and many of the venues that shaped successful careers of widely known Gothenburg indie acts two decades ago have disappeared. But the band have a solution: to adapt their music for TikTok videos – or maybe not?
I know you’ve said that you were inspired by the 90s indie scene when the band started. Has it changed over time or do you still embrace that type of music on your new releases?
It has changed, not a lot but it’s still a change. When we started we built on what all of us listened to at the time, and that was quite a wide range of indie music, but after two years of working together, we’ve fused it all together into something we all like. We have our own sound today, something that is different from the bands we listened to when we started.
Our first EP is a good example of how it used to be, it sounded like four completely different songs that didn’t really fit together, just songs building on different influences. That’s different today.
But we’re still influenced by specific bands. Three songs on the new EP we call the “The Strokes songs”, we always have working titles like that (laugh). Songs like ”It’s All Just The Same”, ”Would It Really Change?” and “Malacca” represent the closest we’ve ever been to The Strokes.
But having working titles is a complete mess for us (laugh). We don’t even know the real names of the songs, just the working titles, and again it’s about us not being good at giving our songs real titles until the very last minute. Just take “Brightside”; David came up with the idea to the song but he wanted the working title to be something like “Sunflower”, but we can’t have it like that and the rest of us called it “DC” because we think that DC Shoes is the goofiest thing you can wear (laugh).
This type of indie music was huge in the nineties, especially in Gothenburg, but today the scene is fading away. Indie music clubs disappear and people, in general, listen to other types of music. Does it feel like you started a bit too late?
I [Adrian] played in a sixties band a few years ago and they were a better fit in time than we are today (laugh). The question is where to play in Gothenburg today when many of the indie clubs have disappeared, like Jazzhuset, and then we don’t know how many will be left after the pandemic.
People don’t listen to indie rock anymore, it’s not what dominates the playlists at Spotify at the moment, but we write music we like and will continue doing it. But never think we’re a revival band from the 90s just because we’re bringing those influences into our music, it’s indie music for the 20s. But maybe it would have been fun to do this 25 years ago just to see how it would have worked out (laugh).
Just like you said, your debut album was released two weeks ahead of the lockdown last year. I guess you had big plans involving club gigs and festival gigs.
Maybe we wouldn’t call it “plans” though (laugh), we were hoping for festival gigs but didn’t have anything booked when it all stopped, but we had enough shows to play and it’s a bit sad that it didn’t happen.
Everything was just horrible timing, it was such bad luck to release Sagrada Familia just days before the lockdown. We had lots of expectations because it was our debut album, and for the first time we had a great label to back us. And people had heard about us; we didn’t have to call venues to whine about getting gigs, they gave us a call. It was all set for some great gigs and happenings. And then nothing happened instead (laugh).
Is that the challenge for you, to deal with a lost year?
The biggest challenge today is to adapt our songs for TikTok. All bands do it, why not we? (laugh) No! That’s a joke, we promise it will never happen (laugh). But it’s interesting though (laugh).
It’s not easy to release music in any form at the moment because people won’t listen to it for more than a few days. When you release an album or an EP, people will listen to it the first two weeks after the release day, and when you come to their hometown for a show they start to listen again. When you can’t play live you’ll drown in the massive flow of releases and your records won’t get that extra push. As long as the pandemic continues, it’s super hard to release any music at all.
We have pushed the EP in the UK with some help from Westside Music Sweden and when the pandemic is over and the live scene returns we just have to be ready to come out and play.
It’s not an easy task to plan anything for the rest of the year, but maybe you have something in the works at the moment?
We hope to get back into our rehearsal space again. It hasn’t really been a problem to get in, we have the keys and the landlord won’t probably guard it, but we follow the restrictions and will wait until it’s allowed again.
At the moment most of us work with stuff in our homes, and to be honest, it shouldn’t be a problem to work on new music because we can add stuff to the songs wherever we are by sending it around. But you lose motivation and energy when you can’t meet. It doesn’t really work out for us. Our best ideas are born in the rehearsal space when we play new songs together over and over again and add new layers until it becomes something we all like. That’s our work process.
But we have a new EP out and can afford us to have a break for a while, we don’t need to release anything tomorrow or next week. But when we can start to rehearse again we’ll probably be superefficient because we all have new ideas and haven’t met for quite a while, and all that has to come out.
If Sweden opens up and we can do 50-shows during the summer, we have to work hard to get a few gigs. But first we have to rehearse because we haven’t played together for almost a year (laugh).
Photographer: Björn Vallin
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