Over the past few years I’ve written a bit about acclaimed Stockholm, Sweden-based indie rock act Honeymilk, and as you may recall the act which was formed as a quartet featuring founding members Marcus Admund (vocals) and Albin Wesley (bass), along with Nikki Nyberg (guitar) and Erik Fritz (drums), could trace their origins to the formation and breakup of an earlier band Urmas Planet, which also featured several members of the band’s initial lineup.
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. After the release of their Brit Pop meets classic psych rock-like “A Scene in Between,” and subsequent releases, the band went through a massive lineup change that resulted in the band becoming a duo featuring co-founder Admund and Nyberg. As a result of the lineup change, the band experienced a radical and perhaps necessary change in sonic direction, as you’d hear on the breezy, Vampire Weekend-like synth-based single “Time Will Kill You,” which received attention across the blogosphere and amassed over 140,000 streams on Spotify.
Admund and Nyberg released I Want You To Be Very Happy, the highly-anticipated follow up to Lean on the Sun. The album which featured album singles “The Nothing New,” “Time Will Kill You,” and “Trip” managed to receive praise from a number of major media outlets including Clash Magazine, BBC Fresh On The Net and Jajaja Music as well as airplay on Sweden’s P3, Amazing Radio, Germany’s Flux FM, Norway’s NRK P13 and Finland’s YLE Soumi.
Interestingly, the band’s latest single “It’s All In My Hands” was written and recorded during the I Want You To Be Very Happy sessions but wasn’t finished and was subsequently cut from the album. Sonically speaking, the song will further cement the Swedish act’s reputation for crafting material that effortlessly meshes psych rock and Brit pop with rousingly anthemic hooks; but with subtle elements of 70s disco. As the band mentions in press notes, the song is actually one of their first politically charged songs. “We wanted to take ourselves seriously and write about the tiresome right-wing, life-coach cliché that everything is possible just as long as you give everything,” the members of Honeymilk say in press notes. “Basically leaving them with no other responsibility for people’s lives except cashing their cheques. To take down the cynism a bit we added some disco-feel to it. It’s recorded a couple of years ago in our former studio at Odenplan, Stockholm, from which we got kicked out threatened to be sued for 100 000 kronor. We never got to release ‘It’s All In My Hands.’ We forgot about [it]. And now – we happened to fall in love with it again.”
