Messed!Up
Just imagine that your band just won a music award and was picked for a gig in Los Angeles at the Nordic Oscar Weekend, and had planned for a tour on arrival back in Sweden to reap the benefits of their rising fame and glory – and then the whole scene ends up in (basically) a two year long lockdown.
At the beginning of 2020, Gothenburg four-piece Kårp, who had amassed a small but fervent following releasing electronic pop that picks up on where The Knife left off, received the Manifest Award for their debut album, Album 1, and headed off for a gig in LA. With such a kick-start, the band had a detailed rollout plan ready for the rest of the year, and 2020 seemingly laid open for a well-deserved breakthrough.
But even the most carefully laid plans were detonated by the rise of COVID-19, a pandemic that made nearly every aspect of Kårp’s rollout unfeasible. How the band respond? They didn’t allow themselves to fall into depression and decided to see it as an opportunity to spend more time in the studio. And two years later the result is near: Kårp is about to release three EP’s during 2022 and the first EP arrived already today. The theme? The apocalypse.
Messed!Up met up with the band for an interview in Gothenburg and ended up in a chat about their apocalyptic visions across three EP’s, the hard work to get back to the top, and how they share sonic DNA with The Knife.
The restart of Kårp
A lot happened since we met about two years ago. You received a Manifest Award for your debut album, and you embarked on an international adventure and did a gig in LA just before the pandemic arrived in 2020. How was it to come out and play at an international scene for the first time?
It was big for us and the LA gig was supposed to have been followed by a tour in Sweden. We were booked as support to Pale Honey at Pustervik and had a few more dates coming up after it, but as we all know by now everything was cancelled and we didn’t do any shows at all. That was a massive blow for us because we had so much energy after the LA gig and just wanted to come out and play shows.
Playing in LA was amazing but weird at the same time. We played at the Nordic Oscar Weekend at an event organized by the Norwegian embassy. Mattias at Westside Music Sweden knew someone who put us on the roster of the event, and it was just us and a Norwegian band performing. And then there was some sort of award handed out by the embassy to a Norwegian film director.
But it became quite obvious that we’re not really used to that type of events, you know when you walk the red carpet and all that stuff, and we’re certainly not used to the American business culture. If you don’t know any celebrities you don’t get any friends (laughs). There was this guy asking us if we know Alicia Vikander or Dolph Lundgren because we’re Swedes and of course we don’t, and he just said “Why are you even here?” (laugh).
But it was a great start of 2020 with the Manifest Award and the gig in LA, and we really believed that “This is it, it’s gonna be a great year for Kårp”.
Most definitely! 2020 felt like the year of Kårp, when you were about to get your big breakthrough – and then the pandemic happened. How did you handle it?
Yeah, with the Manifest Award and all that happened around it, it was the highway to fame and glory (laugh). But we just changed the plan a bit and decided to use the pandemic to do something good and spent lots of time in the studio writing new music. We didn’t allow ourselves to become depressed, just see it as an opportunity instead.
At the beginning of the pandemic, we did a few live streams but it wasn’t really something we felt comfortable doing at all, it didn’t really pan out as we wanted. Kårp should be experienced live in front of a live audience because our visuals – the lights and overall production – are such a huge part of the experience. That’s so important to us. But nothing of it worked out at all and we turned down most requests quite soon after the pandemic started. All bands were super excited about live streams the first few months of the pandemic, it was the only way to play live, but quite soon everyone realized it wasn’t fun without an audience and it faded out quite quickly.
But like we said, we stayed in the studio, locked the door and decided “Let’s make new music and let it take time to write new music”.
But does it feel like you have to restart Kårp and work hard on reaching out to people again? It’s almost two years since the success of your debut album and modern music fans are quite disloyal and fickle when bands don’t release music for a long time. There’s always something else to listen to.
Maybe you’re right. We’ve always wanted to reach a position where we can do whatever we want and not lose fans on the way. If you see it like that, it feels like a restart because we didn’t reach that position before the pandemic. We thought “Hey, we’ve done an award-winning record, it’s a highway to the top”, but since we didn’t even get the chance to reap the benefits of our debut album and build up our fanbase, it’s a restart. The longer the silence, the more you fade out. It’s just how this business works out. Let’s say it’s slightly sloping upwards at the moment (laugh).
But it’s not a complete restart; the ”It Looks Bad” single has done really well, and we’ve realized that it may not be as hard as we first thought because people seem to remember us (laugh). We have never released a single that created such a buzz as “It Looks Bad”, that was quite a surprise.
Three stories on the apocalypse
As you said, 2022 will see the return of Kårp and lots of new music. But the first teaser arrived already last autumn when you released the “It Looks Bad” single. Am I allowed to say that it sounds a lot like The Knife?
(laugh) You know, we realized that people would say something like that and had a discussion about it in the band, but thought “Is it too much The Knife? Fuck it, it’s a contribution to a great band” (laugh).
It’s fascinating that a small city like Gothenburg contains so many different scenes. Gothenburg is renowned for its metal scene but we also have a great indie scene and an amazing electronic scene that gave birth to bands like The Knife. They have a unique sound and we just picked up on where they left off. It’s a Gothenburg sound, thus it’s in our DNA. If one of our songs sounds like The Knife, we should be excited about it because it means we’re part of the Gothenburg sound, and that’s something to be proud of.
You release a series of EP’s during the whole year if I understand it right. Is it even a concept imprinted across three EP’s, all with different sonic landscapes?
Most definitely different, but maybe different themes rather than a concept, and they all revolve around the apocalypse. What’s a bit scary is that we already decided to write something about the apocalypse before the pandemic arrived – the apocalypse is a captivating topic – and then it all came true. It all felt like a premonition of something really bad about to come when it started, and we thought “It’s actually happening” (laugh).
Th first EP is called Kris [“Crisis” in Swedish]. It’s four songs on the EP and “It Looks Bad” is one of them, and we’re very excited, and nervous, to see how people will respond to it because the other three songs are very different from the single. And from there it all changes. The second and the third EP’s are different from the first. That’s the whole idea of releasing three EP’s that represent some sort of an apocalyptic scenario in three stages.
We’ve surprised ourselves with how everything evolved during the process. Having more time to spend in the studio gave us time to dig deep in our archives and we found some hidden treasures that we translated into songs and combined with new music to create the sound on the EP’s.
Kris is about the collapse and downfall of society and it’s a very dark EP and hardly the easy listening our fans are used to. It’s really not a crowd-pleaser (laugh), save for “It Looks Bad”. Like we said, we’re excited and a bit nervous about what people will think about it because we don’t really want to lose fans. But at the same time, we’re super proud of what we’ve done and that we allow ourselves to write music that may not please the audience. The second EP is a lot quieter, like the calm before the storm; and on the third EP we explore a new world on the rise and the return of society, and it’s something made for the clubs.
If we summarize it; the first EP is very dark, the second is quiet and the third is happy and is going to be the hit EP (laugh). Or is the second EP the hit EP? We don’t know!(laugh)
And it’s three EP’s, not an album. It’s better to chop it up into three pieces rather than releasing a full album?
We talked quite much about the format and how we wanted to release music, if we wanted to release a second album or do something else. That was an important discussion considering that we got the award for an album, not an EP. But do people really listen to albums anymore? It just feels like most people don’t. That’s one of the reasons we decided to release music in three parts. Maybe we release an album sometime later again but at the moment it works better for us to release EP’s.
It’s also easier to have an evolving theme, or different themes, over three EP’s. When we started we only released singles and it worked really well for us doing it like that. Working on an album takes time and it means we’ll have a long break from meeting fans at venues or meeting up with magazines for interviews. We learned that from working on our debut album; it was quite a change for us, being used to release singles only. With these EP’s we hope to keep people interested in Kårp across the whole year. As soon as they forget us, there’s a new EP out (laugh).
Album 1, the debut album, was very successful but with success comes pressure. Have you felt any pressure on how to go beyond your debut album and write something even better?
Not really. We’ve never been an album band anyway, just a singles band. And you can’t compare the album to the EP’s because they’re something completely different, an evolving apocalyptic theme across three records. For us, releasing the EP’s will be much better than releasing an album.
Waiting for the live scene to return
I remember from our last chat that we talked about Kårp as an art project transmitted through visuals and adding some mystery with masked band members. Have you spent any time working with the visual side of Kårp and added or changed something in the live setup?
We’ve made reflective safety vests with our logo on the back (laugh) and ordered a hundred vests for children, and we’re going to hand them out to kindergartens. Children represent the future, our hope in the world that will rise after the apocalypse. It may sound a bit weird when we say it like this, but we’ve shot photos of kids wearing our vests and they will turn up in different ways during the year. It’s just like Kraftwerk and their ”muzik arbeiter”; that’s something we have in common with them, but we’re using children (laugh).
But we also bought new lights and prepared new light shows, and some other visuals you will see when we start to play live again.
Last time you also said that you didn’t need to put much work on finding people to work with you on videos and visuals, they rather lined up and wanted to work with Kårp because of the brand you’ve built. Do people still line up to work with Kårp?
To some part they do but it doesn’t always work out for us. Lots of people still reach out to us and want to do our videos, but it needs to work with our vision as well, and it rarely does. Many times the projects are too long or too big and we don’t have time for it. Some of us have families and we all have ordinary jobs and can’t spend lots of time on a huge video project. We would love to, but it’s not really feasible at the moment.
In the next few months it’s probably not going to be possible to do any shows at all, but do you have anything in the pipe when you’re allowed to put up shows again? I guess you want to come out and play your EP’s.
We did our first live show in two years just before Christmas and it felt weird and scary at the same time (laugh).
When we release the first EP on January 27th we had planned for a release party, but it’s cancelled. It was supposed to have kickstarted everything again, but something works against us (laugh). We have two more shows booked, in Linköping and Stockholm, but as we don’t know if they will be postponed we haven’t made them official yet. You know, it’s quite frustrating to wait two years, even postpone our first EP release for a year to wait for better times, and then there’s a new lockdown. That’s a real mental challenge.
But we couldn’t wait to release the records any longer. They are new to our fans but for us they’re old and we want to start working on new music soon again. As soon as Kårp releases a record we get quite much attention and our social media explodes. But to reach that point we need to play live, that’s how people discover us. Maybe they’ve listened to one or two of our singles but after a show they’re mind-blown and they tell their friends. Word-of-mouth is still the best promotion tool for us. But with the first EP, we need to rely completely on that people find us interesting for our music.
But do you plan for any European dates as well?
If the opportunity turns up, but we’ll probably wait until the second EP is released. We have a new management but not a booking agent yet and haven’t started talking about gigs in Europe. But if anyone wants to book us, we’re ready (laugh).
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Photographers: Björn Vallin, Krichan Wihlborg and Richard Bloom
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