Viagra Boys are as prolific as they come when you’re talking in terms of sax-fueled, Swedish, post-punk groups fronted by chaotic hell raisers. They’ve left no stone unturned, sung about death and sports, and blazed fury across the wide world. There are few groups like them. Cave World, their third and perhaps most ambitious record, is slated to be released July 8 via Year0001. Singer Sebastian Murphy sat down with me via zoom to discuss the new record, life, death, touring, and shrimp.
How has 2022 been for you and the band?
Oh, it’s been going good, man. I’m glad the pandemic is over, but we’ve done a lot of touring lately, and we’re all fucked. It’s been too much, but it’s all right.
I had a chance to see you guys in Phoenix a little while back. How did it feel coming off of your first U.S tour since before the pandemic?
Coming off of the U.S tour felt great, but the problem was, we were only home for like three day,s and then we had to go on another tour for another month. So, it was just like… the tour after that was just brutal. The U.S. tour was so fun, and you (see) so many new places and all of this shit, and then you have to travel around in dreary grey Europe. It was brutal.
Getting into the new record, Cave World. What’s the meaning behind the title?
The meaning behind the title is just where I think we belong. As a society, we’re going backwards, and it’s time to move back into our caves.
What was fueling the songwriting on this record? Where was the inspiration coming from?
There’s a lot of different inspiration, but I think a lot of it was just, like, inspired by what’s going on in the world today. It’s kind of just commentary on this weird situation that the worlds been in for the past three years. Otherwise, musical inspiration we wanted to do something a bit more different and a little bit more extreme from what were used to and wanted to push our boundaries.
I’ve noticed quite a bit of country influence on both the new record and Welfare Jazz with the John Prine cover and tracks like Punk Rock Loser. Where did that country influence come from?
I think that comes from just when I was a kid my dad used to play a lot of Hank Williams at home. I fell in love with Hank Williams, and that’s always been a huge inspiration to me. Just the spirit of country in general, this lonesome sound. Being a bit desperate, and also how country can be a bit contradictory of itself. A lot of these outlaw country artists, their lyrics were really fucked up, and I really love that.
Speaking of lyrics, can you give a rundown of some of the ideas your lyrics are exploring on this record?
Yeah! Most times when I write a record I do it in a short period of time. The music is written in a long period of time, but the actual lyrics are usually written in a short period of time, and they usually reflect kind of what’s going on in my head at that moment. It can be just a couple of months of my life or whatever, and I feel like my head only has space for, like, two or three topics at the same time.
When I wrote the lyrics, I was watching a lot of YouTube documentaries about monkeys and evolution and stuff like that. Also, news channels and commentary channels on current events and fucked up shit that was going on. Especially in the U.S with all of the people fighting about, you know, wearing a mask or not wearing a mask or taking a vaccine. I kind of just mashed it all together in some weird mixture of evolution and current world problems and hoped that there would be some sort of connection.
As far as the music and the writing process as a group, how did that work?
Well, for this album we wanted that before we went to the studio for every song to be completely finished. The record before we kind of just had a riff or something and then we tried to finish the song in the studio and that ended up being kind of stressful and the end product might not be exactly how you want it to be. I think with this album, we just wanted every song to be completely worked out musically. During COVID, we were in the studio every day, practicing from 10 till 3 everyday and kind of like treating it as a normal job.
Do you feel like the space that the pandemic gave you was beneficial?
Yeah, 100%. Especially here in Sweden, we had it pretty easy compared to other parts of the world that had a lot of lockdowns and a lot of turmoil in society with people fighting each other and taking sides. In Stockholm, we had much more of a laidback approach to it. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing, but personally, it was pretty good for me because we were still able to meet up as a band and do whatever we wanted in that sense. It was also just a relaxed period in my life. I kind of took a step back from partying and focused on being productive.
How do you feel like you’ve changed as a band since its inception? How is this record different from you first releases?
In a way, I find that we’re kind of the same. That were a bit militant with what we want to achieve, and at the same time with the newest record, I think we’re a bit more experimental in a way. But as a band, I think we’ve always kind of held the same spirit that we’ve had from the beginning which is something very vision focused.
I think a standout track from the new record is Ain’t No Thief. Can you give a breakdown of the story behind that track?
Well, that track we had a demo of it from our practice room, and we all loved the riff from the beginning. We tried doing a few different things with the singing on it, and it sounded completely different several times throughout the process. Even with the lyrics too. I more sang on that song earlier, and it just didn’t feel like it had enough energy to support the riff because the riff was hard in a way.
Near the end, we had that song recorded musically, and I wasn’t too happy with it, but my bassist showed me a podcast with El-P from Run The Jewels and Killer Mike, and Killer Mike played some old ’80‘s hip pop that had influenced him from the beginning. My bassist sent me one of the songs he had played and said, “Man, can’t you just try doing your lyrics in this approach?” and I felt like, “Oh no, I don’t want to try to rap or anything like that, but I ended up doing it in the studio in one take going through the whole thing with these stupid-ass lyrics. Immediately it felt wrong and right at the same time.
I’ve really been loving the music videos for this record. Can you talk about the process of making those?
Yeah, they’re made by the same guys who did a couple of music videos for the last album, Ain’t Nice and Creatures. They’re super creative really cool dudes. So, I had the privilege of being in the creative process with them from the very beginning. Eric, the director, had some ideas for both videos after listening to my feedback, and I thought they sounded great, so I just went with it.
He let a lot of it be up to improv, saying, like, I’m going to film this, and I’m thinking that you just do your thing, but the whole premise of the videos he came up with. You know that I was going to be in a church or that I would be a cowboy. We filmed it in Romania. In Romania’s Hollywood, which is also a funny idea to me. I kind of hate music videos, and I hate doing it, but the end result was pretty cool.
Can you tell me about Shrimptech and the Shrimptech Ecstasy Lab offshoot?
Shrimptech Enterprises is all of our creative ideas put into one big, fake company. When we first started out, there was a lot of talk about shrimps, and that’s a reference to amphetamine, but since, I’ve stopped doing amphetamines; it’s gone on to be this creative world, and I like the idea of world building. I just love this idea that there’s this huge company behind everything we do.
Is it true that Shrimptech is a legally registered business in Sweden?
Yeah, we all work for Shrimptech.
I’ve noticed you have an impressive collection tattoos. You’re a tattoo artist yourself. How did you get involved in the tattoo world?
I started tattooing, like, 12 years ago so, I’ve been doing it for most of my professional life. It’s been my bread and butter for a long time, and it’s what I thought I would be doing the rest of my life until this band started out of nowhere. I had no aspirations in starting a band until my bassist kind of forced me to try singing at some band practice once. Before that I thought tattooing was what I was going to be doing for life, and it’s just a great way of being able to do artwork and make money off of it as well. Also, it’s just a culture that I’ve always had a lot of respect for and something that’s kind of fringe, outsider culture with a lot of tradition to it.
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Watch the video for “Big Boy” here:
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Photo courtesy of Rachel Shorr
