Once you’ve grown blasé, as I have, about the Swedes having given us dynamite, Abba, and Swedish meatballs (which they inexplicably just call meatballs), you’re bound to ask, as I have, “What else you blond and perfect people got?”
The answer is Viagra Boys, who since 2018’s Street Worms have been making some of the darkest, funniest, and most musically explosive music to come along since, well, Abba accidentally blew themselves up with dynamite while tinkering with a radical new meatball recipe back in the 1980s.
Ever since I first saw the videos for “Research Chemicals” and “Sports” I knew Viagra Boys were something special—a band to whom you can attach as many labels as you want (punk rock, post-punk, art punk, dance punk, new rave, cave rave, and I could go on) and still miss the essence of what they’re doing, which is mating black humor to music that is endlessly adventurous and makes abundant use of (amongst your more traditional instruments) a skronking saxophone. They sound like nobody else, and certainly no one else is as prone to sheer lyrical weirdness as vocalist Sebastian Murphy, who, to add to the oddness quotient, just happens to be a native of San Rafael, California.
Viagra Boys have released four LPs in all, my favorite being the third, 2022’s Cave World, which is a sort of combination Devo-school study of de-evolution and mocking critique of your modern conspiracy theorists of the QAnon school. It’s a concept album, in other words, but the concept is loose enough to allow for such outliers as “Punk Rock Loser” and “Ain’t No Thief.” The concept gives Murphy the opportunity to go full QAnon nutjob on tracks like “Creepy Crawlers,” “The Cognitive Trade-Off Hypothesis,” and “Return to Monke,” but know what?
Sometimes I just want to listen to the badass tracks that slap you right upside the head, which is where the “Punk Rock Loser” single comes in. It includes “Troglodyte,” which touches on the album concept, but you also get “Punk Rock Loser” and “Ain’t No Thief,” which in my book makes it the perfect little sampler for folks who want an introduction to the best thing to come out of Sweden since IKEA. Only Viagra Boys are a better bet than IKEA because you don’t have to assemble them yourselves only to find you’ve left out the saxophone or God forbid Murphy’s lyrics, which are smarter by far than ninety-five percent of the lyrics coming out of your English-speaking countries, which does not bode well for anybody.
“Punk Rock Loser” has a bass-heavy dance beat that more or less behaves itself until the wild instrumental breaks that let you know these guys are punks at heart. As for Murphy, he has an authoritative voice and is playing it both ways from the start; he’s not your average punk rock loser, he sings, but he certainly has quaint ideas of what constitutes a winner. “ I’m rocking a little gold chain/That ain’t real gold, I told you that it’s fucking fake,” he sings, and the Promethazine and 7Up that he’s drinking is hardly the beverage of champions.
He’s loose, a savage, and when he sings, “And I don’t go to parties where folks get dressed up/I go to the function just to fuck shit up” or “And I’m sorry, honey, but I gotta confess/Don’t give a fuck about you, I could really care less” what you’re getting is a commentary on toxic masculinity. But there’s nothing toxic about the aforementioned instrumental breaks, which feature some far-freaking out mayhem from guitarists Linus Hillborg and guest Pelle Gunnerfeldt. Both Gunnerfeldt and Elias Jungqvist throw in on keyboards as well.
“Troglodyte” is a triple time number with anachronistic synthesizers and cool guitars fills and has Murphy both waxing eloquent on the theory of evolution and comparing a future workplace shooter and conspiracy theorist (“He says he don’t believe in science/He thinks that all the news is fake/And late at night he sits on his computer/And writes about the things he hates”) to a troglodyte, which in his (deliberately?) muddled understanding of human evolution is a step down from the ape. I dig Murphy’s stutter and blubber rock flourishes towards the end—he’s an excitable boy. And if “Troglodyte” isn’t as detailed a critique of the cracked QAnon mind as some of the other songs on the album, it makes up for it in sheer pile driver appeal.
“Ain’t No Thief” is a real pummel fest, and Murphy could be one of the Beastie Boys trying hilariously to explain away his pilfering ways with the frequent refrain, “I ain’t no thief, we just got the same stuff!” But the devil is in the details, and the details are hilarious and worth quoting at length. His explanations are far-fetched from the get-go:
“I showed up to the party in my favorite coat
On the back was an image of a shrimp on a boat
When you saw what I was wearin’, you got real upset
And said, “That’s the jacket that I got from my grandma”
Oh, well, I promise I ain’t seen you before
And maybe your grandma had bought a couple more
And maybe I helped her at the grocery store
And she gave it to me as a gift.”
And when it comes to explaining away an identical lighter (he just happens to have six or seven in his left pocket), he explains:
“I recall buyin’ this exact lighter when I was 15 years old
My grandpappy gave it to me as a present
Because I had just finished Boy Scout trainin’
And he was so proud of me, that he decided
To create this lighter in the exact same image of yours.”
I’ve known some world-class prevaricators in my time, but this guy ain’t one of them—he peddles in the preposterous, and what makes it so funny is that he’s outraged that anyone would dare question his rectitude. Meanwhile the beat throbs, he throws a few motherfuckers around, and every time he says “We just got the same stuff!” it gets funnier and funnier.
Do yourself a favor; check out songs like “Sports” and “You N33D Me” (the latter’s from the 2025 LP Viagr Aboys), oh and don’t forget to check out “Man Made Out of Meat” (also new), which in case you’re wondering just how out there Murphy is includes the lines,
“They watch TV, they watch TV about a man named Chandler Bing
Who died in a freak hot tubbing accident
And spent his time drinking hot dog flavored water
On a popular TV show called Tub Girls.”
I dearly hope these guys will be around for a long time. As in Swedish meatball long time. The Swedes have a proverb that goes “Han hade tur som fick en tjej med två armar.” It translates roughly as “He was lucky to get a girl with two arms.” Which is apropos for the kind of guy (namely Murphy) who sings things like “I can bring the type of vibe to the party that nobody likes and I make everybody sad.” You have to look hard for a line that funny. Murphy has six or seven just as good in his left pocket.
But he ain’t no thief!
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A
