It’s not easy to make it as a band in today’s world. This, Dear Reader, is not news. Spare a thought, then, for Swedish punk rock losers Viagra Boys, whose name alone is enough to redirect a newsletter to junk or raise a few eyebrows when merch is worn out of context. Despite this handicap, the band have smashed their way through enough ceilings to be rolling out their fourth LP, the almost-self-titled ‘Viagr Aboys’, and squaring up for a gig in Sweden’s biggest venue, the Avicii Sphere.
“It’s a huge deal; now we’ve just got to actually fill it,” laughs vocalist and frontman Seb Murphy, dialling in from the band’s practice space in Stockholm, coffee in hand. “We’re here every day,” he says, gesturing at the room. “Still making music, at least for a couple of hours – I’m a pretty lazy person, so it helps if we plan things pretty meticulously; we’ve got a good work ethic nowadays.”
So far, so placid. It’s all a far cry from Seb’s on-stage persona and personal past as a speed fiend more interested in old electronics and shrimp than he is with songcraft. It’s been a gradual shift, but with most of the band now having young kids and Seb in a happy relationship, it’s no surprise that the intake of illicit substances has dropped off somewhat. “Benke, our bassist, has always pushed us to push ourselves,” he explains. “He realised we could make a living from music, right from the start. If I had done things my way, I’d be playing the same songs from the first EP and doing speed in a garage somewhere. I probably wouldn’t still be alive, but I would have been skinnier, at least,” he laughs. “Skinny and dead.”
In the absence of leaving a beautiful corpse in a suburban Stockholm garage, Viagra Boys are instead on the precipice of releasing ‘Viagr Aboys’. First single ‘Man Made of Meat’ picks up where the band are most comfortable, mixing deceptively skilled instrumentals with absurdist imagery which includes, but isn’t limited to: Chandler Bing, flexing your muscles outside McDonalds, and chatting to an AI chatbot of someone’s mum. Second single ‘Uno II’, however, takes more than a small step into the unknown. Eerie flute punctuates a stream-of-consciousness story told from the point of view of Seb’s dog, who has been in and out of the vet to have its teeth removed. Slipping in and out of character, Seb muses on the confusion of going to a strange building and waking up more gum than tooth before turning his gaze inward and wrestling with the sheltered life that socialist Sweden offers.
“It’s a creepy song,” he admits with a gold-toothed smile. “We chose it as a single because I love the flute, and I love my dog. Imagine some doctor putting you to sleep, and then when you wake up, you’re missing half your teeth though; it’d be weird as fuck.
“But then it goes over into how I feel talking about problems we have in Sweden when compared to this immigrant veterinarian who took out my dog’s teeth – his parents are from Croatia, and they were in this war, and they’ve had a really rough life. There’s a sense of guilt to even complaining about my life. There’s been a coup in America, and people are getting shot in the street. It sucks out here in Europe, too, with the rise of right-wing fanatics, but I have a hard time complaining about it because at least most people seem to want a democracy… for now, at least. I’ve got no idea why I chose a song about my dog’s dentist to talk about that, but hopefully it works,” he says with a laugh.
“We chose it as a single because I love the flute, and I love my dog”
The turn inward on ‘Uno II’ is mirrored across an album which, as the name might suggest, is more introverted than 2022’s ‘Cave World’ with its satirical portraits of online weirdos and conspiracy theorists. “I think the last album was almost too conceptual for me,” says Seb. “I just wanted to go back to being a bit simpler and a bit stupider, to get in touch with myself and move away from taking it so seriously.” In doing so, album tracks like ‘Store Policy’ and ‘Waterboy’ call to mind the Viagra Boys of debut album ‘Street Worms’, with lyrics from the point of view of the kind of degenerate who is willing to ‘steal a bike, make a couple bucks’. “Those songs, in part, draw from who I was when we started the band,” he admits. “It’s still who I am at the end of the day – I think everyone is a bit of their own Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. That’s a relationship I used to find difficult, but now I’m more comfortable with the idea that we’re all playing characters, in a sense.
“I wanted it to be a bit more like older Viagra Boys where I would just see where my mind takes things, rather than sitting there thinking, ‘Okay fuck, the world is really fucked up, and I’ve gotta write a song about it!’ When I hear other bands force it like that, I don’t enjoy it, so I want our songs to come from a genuine place and to sound like they do, too.
“A weird thing about speed is that everyone who takes it gets really into bikes and stereos – mechanics and electronics. So I used to steal a lot of bikes when I was on drugs, which ‘Waterboy’ references. I look back on that previous image of me nodding off on a sofa, chasing drugs; it’s not a lot of fun,” he laughs and takes a sip of coffee. “But at the same time, it felt fun a lot of the time – it’s pretty dark, I guess.”
It’s a layer of distance and self-reflection which has grown as Viagra Boys have gone on. ‘Cave World’ saw Seb reference his ADD publicly and grapple with its possible effects on his life. On ‘Viagr Aboys’ this probing continues, with the slow, meandering ‘Medicine for Horses’ seeing him almost croon his way through a song which is partly about paying a guy to get his horse to stomp you on your head, partly a reflection on self-destructive tendencies.
“I was much less vulnerable when I wrote the early Viagra Boys songs,” he acknowledges. “And with that, you end up writing everything as a joke. Now, I think that still happens, but it’s balanced by some seriousness, too. On ‘Medicine for Horses’, there’s the line ‘Life is hard, and it’s harder when you like it hard’, and that’s basically how I feel about living with ADD and substance abuse problems. It’s tough, but hopefully, some people will listen to that song and relate in some way.”
Self-reflection reaches further than thinking about possible reasons for past mistakes, though. If ‘Stretch Your Arms’ on ‘Cave World’s deluxe edition was Seb’s first attempt at vocalising how he feels about his girlfriend, then ‘River King’ sees him perfect the formula. Accompanied only by a piano line and some occasional sax, simple lines about playing video games and eating Chinese food are transformed by the intensity with which they’re delivered.
“That song only happened because our keyboard player was playing that riff, and I wanted to write a love letter to my girlfriend,” Seb explains. “I’ve never written a love song except for ‘Stretch My Arms’, and I always feel bad because it seems like something you should do. It wasn’t really designed to be on the album initially, but we ended up closing with it, and I think it ties the whole thing together really well.”
If this all sounds like a bit of a left turn from the heavily tattooed shrimp obsessive, that’s because it is. But Viagra Boys have never really abided by what people expect of them. From the country duet with Amy Taylor of Amyl and the Sniffers on ‘In Spite of Ourselves’ to the conceptual conspiracies of ‘Cave World’, upsetting expectations is just what they do. ‘Viagr Aboys’ has more than enough adrenaline-fuelled absurdity to placate people who just want to leap around and lose their minds, but it’s when things slow down and Seb takes the time to reflect that the album really shines. “It’s fun, and it’s scary; I worry everyone will hate us every time we release a song,” he laughs. “But we’re doing alright so far – if it doesn’t work this time around, we’ll just go and do something else.”
Viagra Boys’ album ‘Viagr Aboys’ is out 25th April.
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