Back in 1988, four Uppsala, Sweden-based teens decided to start a band after returning from a trip to West Berlin. Heavily inspired by the avant garde scene there, Big Fish‘s original lineup featured vocals, upright bass, samplers and scrap metal percussion. With the addition of a guitarist in 1990, the newly-minted quintet became part of an emerging local scene that would subsequently birth acts like Watain, Misery Loves Co., Lost Souls, Malaise and Defleshed.
Throughout the better part of the 1990s, the Swedish outfit recorded three studio albums, including 1996’s Micheal Blair-produced Andar i Halsen, which they supported with frequently touring across Scandinavia, playing over 500 shows.
The band broke up in 1997 after its members left Uppsala for work and studies. But their fanbase’s clamoring demand for hearing their material live resulted in the Swedish band playing a handful of reunion shows in 2016.
2022’s surprise fourth album, Kalla döda drömmar was released to critical praise and was supported by extensive touring across their native Sweden. The band spent the next year writing and recording material, including a six planned singles which will appear on the band’s forthcoming fifth album, Frya liter stoft (Four liters of dust) slated for release next year.
Frya liter stoft‘s third and latest single “SNÖ” (Snow) is a brutally forceful and thrashing ripper, anchored around down-tuned and rumbling bass, fuzzy power chords and thunderous syncopated drumming, rousingly anthemic and enormous hook and chorus paired with urgent and punchily delivered vocals singing lyrics in Swedish describing a return from a bleak metaphorical winter of isolation — or perhaps intoxication — and discovering that nothing is left.
“SNÖ” manages to capture the uneasy brutal nature of our bleak, mad, mad existence. All is very dire now, y’all.
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