With the release of 2019’s Mouth Full of You EP, rising Malmö-based shoegazer outfit and JOVM mainstays Spunsugar — Elin Ramstedt, Cordelia Moreau, and Felix Sjöström — quickly established a unique, genre-blurring take on shogaze, which meshed elements of industrial electronica, post-punk, noise rock and dream pop. Mouth Full of You earned the band international attention, with the EP receiving airplay from BBC 6 Music‘s Steve Lamacq.
2020 saw the release of their critically applauded, Joakim Lindberg-produced full-length debut Drive-Through Chapel, an album that saw the Malmö-based outfit actively seeking to emulate the sounds of post punk and shoegaze pioneers like Cocteau Twins, Slowdive, and others — but while simultaneously crafting some of their hardest hitting material to date.
2021 saw the release of Things That I Confuse EP, an effort that saw the band still focusing on an overarching post-punk and dream pop aesthetic, while taking an opportunity to spread their creative wings to craft a broader and diverse batch of material.
The Swedish shoegazers highly anticipated sophomore album A Hole Forever is slated for a November 17, 2023 release through Adrian Recordings. Thematically, the album will further cement the band’s fearlessness when it comes to discussing heavy topics with the album touching on the realities of coming to terms with internal shame, getting older and confessing dark secrets with the mindset that life is a slow death.
A Hole Forever’s latest single “It Never Gave Me Anything” is built around classic and beloved shoegaze elements — propulsive and grimy bass lines, thunderous bass lines and hazy reverb-drenched guitars. Those beloved elements are paired with a seamless meshing of electronic, post-punk and pop components that create a subtle yet very modern touch. But under that hazy instrumental is a darker, menacing story about a person’s disturbing relationship with themselves. The result is a song that’s emotionally ambivalent and uneasily uncertain while being unvarnished and deeply probing.
“‘It Never Gave Me Anything’ describes a relationship between a person and an unwanted side of themselves,” the band explains. “This side is so unlike how they want to be that they treat them as a separate entity, maybe even a person. It has always been there, ruining moments, talking to them and making sure that they never forget that it is present. A seemingly never ending list of things this ‘it’ is responsible for is recited over a pulsating beat and bass riff that is both ominous and groovy at the same time. This paired with a wall of distorted guitars that show up in the bridges and choruses, creates a song that makes you question what mood the song leaves you with. As is typical of the band, the song plays with what emotion, as well as which genre, it evokes.”
