Messed!Up
Governments collapse, pandemics come and go but Royal Republic always stay the same. Well, save for their outfits. And their music. The whole point of the Swedish disco rock titans is that they continuously change in thrilling new ways to the surprise of their fans and music listeners across the world, and they can always be relied upon to bring the good times on stage.
We learned to know them as a punkrock-tinged band on their debut album We Are The Royal but the recent years’ sonic adventures have led them onto the path of electronic music and the exploration of disco rock. Their latest album LoveCop even dives into the world of synthwave.
They are for sure a band that continues to surprise, and when they stopped off at Hamburg’s Grosse Freiheit 36 for their two sold-out chaotic, hilarious, and wild LoveCop Tour gigs we sat down with bassist Jonas Almén and guitarist Hannes Irengård for a chat about their sonic ride over the years, not being recognized on home turf, and picking the outfits for their tours.
Building a reputation in Europe
Great to have you back in Hamburg, it was a while ago since we met the last time ahead of that massive sold-out gig at Sporthalle in 2019. The lockdown of the music scene during the pandemic impacted everything and changed a lot, for you as well. You all have families today and I guess it has changed how you work as a band.
Yes, some of us could still enjoy some sleep back then (laugh). For that reason, we’ve started to try out a new way to organize our tours and only play weekend shows at the moment. It will allow us to stay home for most of the weekdays which makes family life so much easier. That’s the biggest change since the last time we met.
Before any of us had families life was a lot more flexible and we could leave whenever someone booked us for a gig or tour Europe for 2-3 months, it was never a problem. Our best year, we toured for almost 250 days and only returned home to wash some clothes and clean up a bit and then left the next day again. That’s not possible anymore, but it’s nothing we miss either. When you’re young and touring is new, there’s just so much energy for living that type of life. We could play a festival gig and someone popped over after the show and asked ‘You wanna play a gig in Paris tomorrow?’, and we’d be like ‘Absolutely!’. That’s how we built our reputation, playing live whenever the chance turned up.
The thing is that we never had a radio hit or got much air time, and we had to do it like this to build a reputation. But we’ve done that and moved on in our lives. Touring is also kind of a routine now, it’s the same type of process every time and we know how it works out, and we have an audience. That calms us down and we don’t need to stress and play every opportunity that turns up anymore.
I was about to say that, you really earned your time in the spotlight by being a touring band. But back home, in Sweden, it’s different. It doesn’t feel like you got as much attention as in Europe. When you read Swedish magazines they want you to be a rock band and play more We Are The Royal kind of music.
Hell no, we’ve never been invited to hang out with the cool people in Sweden and very few magazines review our records and gigs. We don’t even get interview requests from music magazines, just the local post who’s proud of their local band. But there’s a fanbase, people turn up at our shows even if we don’t get any media attention because they follow us on social media and on Spotify.
Maybe it was all about bad luck. I [Jonas] remember our early years, like 14-15 years ago, when we headed out in Sweden on weekends wherever people wanted us to play, and when the buzz started around the band we were booked to the Hultsfred Festival [Sweden’s biggest festival at the time] to play at the main stage and we thought ‘This is it, we’re gonna break big now’, and then they went broke and canceled the festival. FKP Scorpio bought the festival, restarted it two years later, and booked us, but people never returned and it turned out to be a flop.
But does Sweden’s music scene matter anymore when you sell out huge venues in Germany, France, and the UK? Sweden is such a small country anyway.
Not really, not when we’re doing great in other countries. We sold 4 500 tickets to our Paris gig and play two sold-out gigs here in Hamburg, and we don’t have the energy to start working from the ground up again which would be necessary to do in Sweden. Don’t get us wrong, we love to play at home but working as hard as we did fifteen years ago, again would be like getting another kid – it’s a tremendous amount of work needed. As long as we sell tickets in Sweden we’ll play there but we won’t go the extra mile to play as big venues as in Europe. The big cities, Malmö, Gothenburg, and Stockholm, are enough, and then we’ll play in Adam’s hometown Karlskrona because he’s long-time friends with the local organizer Paraply. We’re like an in-house band there.
But we can’t play more than that in Sweden. Geographically, it’s a huge country with great distances and people only come out for shows on Thursdays to Saturdays. Play any other day and you will sell thirty tickets. In Europe, especially in France, Germany, and the UK, we can do a four-week-long tour and almost play every day of the week. That’s efficient and makes touring easier.
From hair metal guitars to disco rock and synth-pop beats
With a great catalogue of bouncy, wild, poppy, catchy rock numbers it was with some excitement we went to the record store to buy their latest album LoveCop. The last years’ genre-bending explorations have made it hard to know anything about the next album, and the best thing that comes to mind when describing their recent music would be by quoting a review of the album, ‘Think The Darkness meets ABBA, possibly with an influence of Gandalf or Sabrina the Teenage Witch’. That pretty much sums it up.
On the recent albums, they’ve pivoted more towards a disco and funk-infused sound, and none more so has the band’s love of a good floor-filler been on display than on LoveCop. And yet they still keep their rock roots on other songs. With that mix of music, it hasn’t always been easy to argue with labels and agencies about the sonic contrasts on their latest albums, especially not in an industry where most music is pigeonholed.
Every new album you’ve released is another step towards disco rock and more electronic music. It has been quite a sonic ride from your debut album We Are The Royal to LoveCop. What’s your connection to electronic music?
You know, when we start writing on something and send demos between us, you’ll know that some songs are done as soon as listen to it the first time but for others we can be like ‘Why don’t we explore this a bit more? Maybe if we open a door to something we haven’t tried yet’. That’s when the fun stuff happens, like ‘Why not change the bass for synth basslines?’. Most often the end result is a lot better. Like everything we write it happens organically, it’s nothing we plan.
Another thing that affects how we write music today is that we don’t live as close as we used to anymore, and we write demos using synthesizers and music software. It’s way quicker to work with electronic basslines for me [Jonas] than plugging in the bass and starting playing. It’s just more efficient. Once you’ve written an electronic piece and it sounds great, you can’t go back to the bass (laugh). We’re not stuck in thinking that it has to be guitar and bass on our songs, it’s the quality of the song that matters.
But going back to your question on the sound; we grew up in the 80s and have that type of music in our DNA whether we want it or not.
I guess you’ve had to pick some fights with labels and PR agencies about the sonic mix on your last albums. Do you ever have to defend it?
Not on this album. But we’ve had discussions about it before with our management and label and PR agency – and we get it. When we started to explore new music and develop our sound a few years ago, it was hard to promote our albums because music is always promoted in genres and different genres have different promotion channels. ‘Are you a rock band or a pop band? Should we promote you in the electronic music magazines?’. I guess it was quite messy to pigeonhole us when we started on this new sonic journey – quite understandable. ‘Ok, you used to be a rock band and now I don’t know what you are. Who am I gonna call?’. We didn’t make it easy for them, but for us it has always been ‘This song can be promoted in that magazine and that one on that radio channel’. For us, that’s natural but the music industry had to learn it. Today, it’s not a problem at all.
It’s also about surprising our fans. They shouldn’t know how the record sounds like until the release day just to raise some excitement, like ‘What will we get this time?’. Isn’t that how it should be? So far, it has worked great, and more and more people turn up at our shows and we sell out bigger venues, and that must mean we’re doing something good, right?
But it’s also an interesting thought to think about where we would have been if we had released four more We Are The Royal albums. There are some people who think that we would have been a lot bigger if we did that. We don’t.
Does it mean that you don’t care about what labels and PR agencies say anymore?
Pretty much, but they’ve also changed as has the whole music industry. You don’t have to have just one sound any more.
I know it’s a cliché but we write music we like, not what other people would want to listen to. For us, it’s like ‘We love these new songs and hope you do it as well’. In the end, it’s the four of us who have to go up on stage every night and play the songs, and when you do that 100 times a year you have the need to feel ‘These are amazing!’. No band could pull through a long tour with songs they don’t like, people would see through it.
Royal Republic is about going out on stage and having fun together and when our fans see that they will have fun too. We’re quite sure we wouldn’t be in the game if we had written four more We Are The Royal albums, it wouldn’t have been fun for us.
But exploring new music avenues must also mean that people finally stopped comparing you with The Hives. I remember that music media couldn’t let go of you being a second The Hives after the release of We Are The Royal.
Exactly! Don’t get me wrong, we all love The Hives, they’re an amazing band – all respect to them. But for us it was so exhausting to hear it all the time. When we played in Växjö [city in south-east Sweden] many years ago and went out to grab something to eat after the soundcheck, we saw this huge poster of us with the text ‘The guys that rock like The Hives’. That was it, we just had enough,
I also think you’re a band that earned a reputation by playing a lot live and by delivering stellar performances. People will come out for your shows to have a good time even if they don’t listen to all your albums.
We have talked about it at times because we’re not a political band that tell people what to think, and our lyrics are quite light-hearted. The reason is that we want people to come to our shows and forget about their crappy jobs and the horrible world we live in. Our goal is to deliver a show that makes them feel like ‘What a night, I had so much fun!’ and forget about the rest. They don’t need to be reminded of the dull life outside the venue. Our goal is only to make them happy.
Something that may have changed even more than your music over the years is your outfits, it changes for every new tour. Was it something that started like a fun idea and then it became more serious and now you have lengthy discussions about the outfit for the upcoming tour?
Maybe! For this tour, we even had a personal tailor. We bought leather jackets that looked really cool and contacted a tailor in Malmö and told him ‘We want a mix between Rob Halford and Carola [Swedish schlager star]’. We’re not extreme in any way, it’s not like Lady Gaga who turned up at a gala dressed in roast beef, but it needs to be a sort of uniform because we decided long ago that we won’t wear different clothes.
The outfit is always connected to the sound of the album. This record has a LoveCop theme and leather jackets with rivets felt natural with references to the 80s; at the Club Majesty tour, we wanted a more colorful and schlager-tinged theme. But we didn’t have a common outfit when we started. On our second album tour, we started out playing in black shirts but after a few gigs we thought ‘Let’s dress in what we feel good about’. But it felt weird after a while and we decided to dress the same way because we’re one band, a unity, and not four different individuals on stage.
I [Jonas] look forward to the day we decide to wear onesies or cozy pants, it would be such a comfortable tour (laughs). But instead, we wear more and more clothes.
As a last question; you’re out on the LoveCop tour and, naturally, most songs on the setlist are from the new album. But what songs would never be dropped from the setlist?
We have one song we’ll never leave out and that’s “Battery”, the Metallica cover. It started early with cover songs on the setlist because our first album is only 35 minutes long and we were booked for 70-minute shows and had to fill the setlist.
The “Battery” tradition started when we supported Donots on tour. Their frontman Ingo is a huge Metallica fan and at the end of the tour we threw in “Battery” on the setlist for his sake – and that’s 14 years ago. We have tried to find a replacement song, but before we headed out on this tour we decided ’Whether we play 15 or 90 minutes it will be on the setlist’.
“Tommy Gun” and “Full Steam Spacemachine” are also two fan favorites we play most of the gigs, and of the newer songs ”RATA-TAT” is quite popular. And we have to play “Getting Along” because it’s by far our most streamed song on Spotify.
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Photographer: Kevin Winiker
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Royal Republic pages
