Messed!Up
The swirling guitars, woozy harmonies, and soaring choruses of the short-lived 90s shoegaze scene returned a few years ago. Legendary bands like Ride, Slowdive, Swervedriver and The Jesus and Mary Chain returned to the scene with comeback tours and new records more than two decades after its peak, and a wave of young bands in thrall to the sound of their early 90s role models turned up everywhere; we’ve seen the rise of bands like Westkust, Ovlov and DIIV.
But there’s a difference. Gone is the motionless and downward-looking performance style of its practitioners that was popularized in the UK between the mid-80’s and early 90’s, which later became the epitome of the downfall of the genre when the press grew bored and Melody Maker’s Dave Simpson in 1993 finally declared that he would “rather drown choking in a bath full of porridge than ever listen to it again”. Today’s bands mix shoegaze with new influences to create the cacophony of clouded bliss that represents Shoegaze 2.0 – and they know how to pull off great shows.
In October last year, Malmö-based Spunsugar released their debut album Drive-Through Chapel but were bereft of the opportunity to tour the record when the pandemic returned in full force. But despite hard times to reach out to an audience the band received media attention from UK giants BBC6 and The Independent, and as the live scene slowly has returned for its summer camp, Elin, Felix and Cordelia have quickly started to book gigs just to make sure they’ll play as much as possible before the gig window closes again.
When Spunsugar popped by Gothenburg to play at Good Luck Club we met up with the band and chat about the return of the shoegaze scene, their latest single “(You Never) Turn Around” and the Belinda Carlisle influences on their upcoming EP.
Debut album and UK attention
First I just have to ask you how it feels to be back on stage again after more than a year in lockdown. It must be amazing to come out and finally play your debut album live?
Most definitely! It turned out a bit weird for us when we released the album in October last year. We did one gig at Plan B in Malmö and felt like “It’s gonna be an amazing album tour”. And then it was back to lockdown again. But we sort of knew what was about to happen when we did that show, the virus had started to spread again and the gig was surrounded by tough restrictions. But we didn’t really want to believe that it was going to happen again. Someone said we were the last band to play live in all of Europe (laugh).
It would have been great to do a few more shows last fall though. You know, you release a record – and not only a record, it’s a debut album – and can’t tour it. And we had gigs booked in Gothenburg, Brighton and London that didn’t happen, that’s a huge bummer.
How did you deal with it in the band? Playing shows, in general, is the reward for all the work you’ve put down on the record, and playing shows in the UK would have been a huge opportunity to ride on the back of the media attention you already got there.
Yeah, but at the same time it was good for us, we just thought “Let’s take time off and relax” because we’d been working very hard with the album. But we didn’t relax at all (laugh). At the beginning of the year, we released the ”(You Never) Turn Around” single and we just finished off a new EP, and all that was made possible because we didn’t do any gigs.
After the album was released we were quite exhausted because we do most stuff ourselves like organizing photo shoots, write press announcements and doing all kinds of boring things. It’s all done DIY, but we’re no graphic designers or writers (laugh) and it takes a bit more time to do it.
It sounds to me like the DIY process is a bit too much to handle. You don’t want someone doing it for you like a PR agency, just to save time?
It’s not a problem to find someone better than us to do it, but it’s expensive and we have to spend the money we’ve saved to record new music, it’s not worth it. We had someone helping us to design the artwork for the album, someone who put together our pieces of ideas to something that didn’t look like complete shit. Other than that, it was all us, we did it ourselves. Not recording the music, of course, that wouldn’t work at all (laugh).
The shoegaze scene returned during the 2010s and bands like Ride, Swervedriver and Slowdive did comeback tours. Quite many new bands have turned up in the scene in Sweden the last years, like Westkust from Gothenburg. What is so special with shoegaze that makes the scene return almost 25 years after its peak?
We’ve seen all those bands live now, on their comeback tours. That’s an inspiration of course, but the real reason we have a second wave of shoegaze is that people your age love the music, you are our target group (laugh).
Isn’t it also just something that happens after a few years? Everything goes in cycles and turns up again twenty years later? What was popular at the beginning of the 1990s was trending in the 2010s as well, like shoegaze. The 70s was popular in the 90s, the 80s at the beginning of the 2000s. As such, it’s a difficult question to answer because it just happens like that.
We’re the first generation that grew up in the Internet era with websites like LimeWire and Pirate Bay and instead of doing school work we spent hours reading about bands on Wikipedia, and if it sounded interesting you downloaded it. When you start to play in bands, naturally you play the same type of music you download and it happened to be a lot of shoegaze.
But don’t think for a second think that we all have the same musical background or the same taste in music, we’re quite different and meet somewhere in between what we all like. And we don’t spend all our time listening to shoegaze. Bands may have stuck to one type of music thirty years ago but today you get impressions from all sorts of music. It’s just more music out there to listen to and it’s good for the band to have all those influences to work with.
[At this point there’s a huge discussion whether Slowdive is good or not, how much they really listen to shoegaze and how Dolly Parton and Emmylou Harris influence their music]
The listener may not hear our Dolly Parton influences, but it’s in the details. It could be something we steal, like a drum beat. Our upcoming EP – we’re not going to talk too much about it at this point – has Belinda Carlisle influences. But it’s probably just we who can hear it.
The Belinda Carlisle EP
Riding on the back of the first wave of shoegaze bands, Spunsugar released their debut album Drive-Through Chapel in October last year, a record that echoes the greatness of ’90s shoegaze in sound and content.
When the pandemic returned and stopped the band from touring the album they changed their plans and started writing new music. At the beginning of 2021, the single “(You Never) Turn Around” popped up on Spotify and half a year later a three-song electronic remix EP of the single surfaced. And they’re ready to release a new EP in the fall – with Belinda Carlisle influences and a bongo drum on it.
Your debut album Drive-Through Chapel is almost a year old but I guess you haven’t talked enough about it because you haven’t toured the record yet. It’s one of the well-produced debut albums I have ever heard.
That’s our studio wizard Jocke [Joakim Lundberg] at Studio Sickan, he’s behind everything worth listening to that comes out of Malmö, a genius. What’s most important is that he understands the music we play and listens to how we want it, but at the same time he isn’t afraid at all to say “Hey guys, are you really sure you want it to sound like that?”. You listen to a guy like that because he wants the best for your music. And he has this amazing ability to tweak the sound, put on his signature sound, and still keep the band’s sonic identity. He always says “This is probably your sound, let’s continue working on it”.
We’ve recorded everything with Jocke, our first single and our debut EP and now the album, and would love to continue working with him in the future as well. 
While most new bands claim that albums won’t get them anywhere because it takes too much time to work on it and it’s better to release two or three EP’s instead, you did the opposite. Releasing albums is becoming rare. Why did you want to do it?
But they’re right, you won’t win anything on releasing an album today (laugh). It’s a very long process and you won’t release music as often as those bands just releasing singles. But it has been a dream to have a vinyl record in your hands with your music on it. I [Felix] was a record collector and always hung out in second-hand stores when I was younger, and to see your own band name on a vinyl record was a milestone in my life. We’ll never earn anything on music anyway, why not release an album (laugh).
Earlier this year you also released ”(You Never) Turn Around” but what’s even more interesting is that you also released a remix single with three DJ remixes. Why did you want to do electronic versions of the single?
That’s actually Magnus decision, our label manager, he came up with the idea and knows the DJs. But we don’t mind at all even if we weren’t involved in any way – and we didn’t want to be involved. It’s just fun to see what people can do with our music. But we don’t really see it as something we have released because we haven’t been involved in the creative process. It’s a homage to Spunsugar (laugh).
It’s a great song with shoegaze vibes and alt rock vibes, but it’s mostly a pop song, and just like with all pop songs you do remixes. And it’s good for promotion. You’ll get extra attention because every time you release something you will get a push on Spotify. It doesn’t really matter if it’s a remix or our own versions. We like it, that’s important, and haven’t heard anything bad about it so far.
If we return to Belinda Carlisle for a second; does it mean less shoegaze and more pop music on the upcoming EP?
Definitely not! We still have these shoegazy songs on the EP in the same spirit as “Jawbreaker”, but some songs are different. One song is even a slow dance (laugh), at least a Spunsugar slow dance. “Jawbreaker” is our Swervedriver song but it also has a Max Martin soul, he’s always in our music somewhere in the background (laugh). And here’s something big: Spunsugar will compete in the Swedish Schlager Contest 2023 (laugh).
No, you can rest assured that we’ll never be in any kind of schlager contest, but it’s not that we dislike that type of contest, it’s just an arena for other bands and artists, not us.
What was the question? I think we lost track of what we were talking about. The EP? We never decide how the next single or EP will sound like, it’s something that happens organically when we’re in the studio. The next EP is a lot more stripped-down for being us, far from the album where our general logic was “More of everything!”.
But don’t be too alarmed, we still sound like Spunsugar because we have a sonic identity by now, a sound that won’t disappear. It’s just that we mix it with metal, country and Belinda Carlisle on the EP (laugh). If we summarize the EP – didn’t we say that we wouldn’t talk about it – it’s a lot like before, a bit more stripped-down, Belinda Carlisle and bongo drums.
[At this point it’s obvious that not all band members know there’s a real bongo drum on the EP and thought it was a sampling]
We’re really proud of what’s coming next, it’s a great EP.
You seem to be on a streak since the debut album came out. Do you have even more songs ready for yet another release after the EP?
No, and this time it’s a no. We’ll probably have some time off. Or? The problem is that after we’ve released something new it usually triggers us to start writing more music. It has always been like that, that’s the reason we have so many songs by now. But we only have great songs (laugh). Well, we’ve done one really horrible song but we’re not telling you which one it is. But let’s do a contest. If someone finds out which song it is we’ll give you a t-shirt and a record (laugh).
The upcoming EP was something that happened quite quickly. We changed rehearsal space, from a tiny and filthy basement to a spacious and clean room with windows. All that triggered us and we just thrust ourselves into writing new songs.
But you don’t feel a tiny pressure to stick to the sound that got you all the attention from British media, like BBC6?
We’re not really worried, people will follow us on this semi-new path because it’s not a completely new Spunsugar sound. On the other hand, we don’t really care about what people would say. If people want to pigeonhole us let them do it and we’ll continue in the direction we want to go (laugh).
We understand that genres are important when you promote your music, no one would find you otherwise, but people tend to interpret music in ways you never would have expected them to do anyway. We’ve been called a gothgaze band, whatever that is, and someone even compared us to Einstürzende Neubauten (laugh). That’s fun and a huge compliment although we don’t hear the same as other people when we listen to our own music. But it is important to let people decide how we sound like, it’s fine for us as long as they don’t think it sounds like complete shit – or folk music. If anyone would say “Hey, it sounds like Swedish folk music” we may say “No, it doesn’t sound like Swedish folk music at all”, that’s where we draw the line (laugh).
We guess it’s the same for all bands. Everyone wants to progress and do something new without losing their sound, and no one wants to make a copy of their latest record. At least we won’t do it.
What’s your future goal? Is it touring Europe in general or do you target the birthplace of shoegaze, the UK?
To be a bit of a pessimist; there will probably be another lockdown later this year and we take all chances we can get to play live now. We have gigs booked until the beginning of September, in Malmö and Berlin, but we can’t do any long-term plans at the moment, it’s just too risky. But we may have more shows coming up to fill up the schedule until September.
The big dream is to tour in America and Japan, but UK is in the cards as well. But at the moment we don’t think too much about it because it won’t happen anytime soon anyway. The future is very uncertain at the moment.
And the rest of 2021 is about releasing the EP?
It’s a lot about the EP but we don’t know when it will be released yet. It just needs to be mastered, and we need to work on the artwork. But the plan is to release a single ahead of the EP in the fall. Just remember you heard it here first (laugh)
Photographer: Björn Vallin
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