The first time I ever saw Johnossi play live was at the festival Augustibuller in small-town of Lindesberg in the central part of Sweden. They hadn’t even released an album yet, and after a set of barely a dozen songs, frontman, singer and guitar player John Engelbert confessed ”Um, we don’t really have anymore songs, so you’re going to have to settle with this.” It was then that the two-man band settled into an acoustic, weird cover of ”P.I.M.P.”. For me, a fifteen-year-old kid just beginning to appreciate music on an intellectual level, this was a brain-buster. The show is one of my most memorable ones ever, and the fact that Johnossi are only two people, acoustic guitar and drums, made them infinitely cool in my eyes.

Johnossi consists of John Engelbert, who, together with drummer Oskar Bonde started playing music together in the upper-class area of Saltsjöbaden in Stockholm in 2004. Like a couple of other Swedish pop/rock acts, their success have been most prominent in Germany, but the band has received much appreciation from their home country and beyond.

Their debut album, Johnossi, consists of twelve strangely unique, beautiful and fantastic songs. Many claim the band set the bar way too high with their debut, and hasn’t been able to leap over that bar since. Johnossi has released four full-length albums since 2006, and the style has been less consistent than one might have hoped for, but they’ve still managed to retain their success internationally. The band has won the award for Group of the Year at P3 Gold twice; together with acts like Mando Diao, Shout Out Louds, Tiger Lou and The Soundtrack of Our Lives, they constitute a wave of 00’s pop/rock from Sweden which have achieved success internationally as well as in the homebound North.

Words by David Johansson

Johnossi is playing at Debaser Medis on 14 December.