Initially comprised of founding members Marcus Admund (vocals) and Albin Wesley (bass), along with Nikki Nyberg (guitar) and Erik Fritz (drums), the Stockholm, Sweden-based quartet Honeymilk can trace their origins to the formation and eventual breakup of Urmas Planet, a band that featured several members of Honeymilk. And with the release of the Linus Larsson-produced single “It Might Be,” the band quickly received both praise across the blogosphere and radio airplay on several radio stations including Amazing Radio and Oxford College Radio. However, after “It Might Be,” the members of Honeymilk decided to go the DIY route, recording their critically applauded full-length debut effort Lean on the Sun.
Now, if you’ve been frequenting this site over the past few years, you may recall that I’ve written about the band on a couple of occasions including their Brit pop and psych rock-channeling single “A Scene in Between.” Sometime after that single and its subsequent recorded efforts, the band went through a massive lineup change in which the band went from a quartet to a duo featuring the band’s co-founder Marcus Admund (vocals) and Nikki Nyberg (guitar). And with such a massive lineup change, the band went through a radical change of sonic direction as you would hear on their breezy, Vampire Weekend-like synth-based single “Time Will Kill You,” a single that received quite a bit of buzz across the blogosphere and over 140,000 streams on Spotify.
Currently, Admund and Nyberg are working on the much-anticipated follow-up to Lean on the Sun — but in the meantime, the duo’s latest single “The Nothing New” is as the band says “could be about finding yourself in an age and situation where the demands that hunt you are increasing; the same that it takes more alcohol to get drunk, it takes great and greater everyday explosions for the static line that life has graduated turned into to be moved. It could also be a pretentious and unclear salute to both Samuel Beckett’s book Murphy or Spacemen 3. Or it could be a very good pop song that means nothing.” Sonically, the song is a breezy and jangling bit of pop that meshes elements of 60s psych pop with Brit Pop (thanks to angular guitars and undulating synths) with an infectious and anthemic hook and ironic lyrics while being both radio and arena rock-friendly.
The recently released music video features the duo of Admund and Nyberg as though they were on a cooking show — but a cooking show in which they spend a great deal of time hanging out and goofing off, before inviting a couple of studio-manufactured, casting call guests to their place. It’s an unusual take on the song but it still manages to capture the irony within the song; however, in this case, the irony seems to be that in a post-modern world everything that possesses earnestness may also be manufactured for you.
