Liking guitar music isn’t always fashionable in 2016, with the era of the electronic producer still going strong. But in Stockholm the genre seems to slowly coming back, with lots of new exciting bands popping up to to inject blood and life back into the scene. One of the most exciting bands around is four-piece Moon City Boys (singer and guitarist Sofia Eklund, drummer Josefina Pukitis, guitarist Kelly Wedin and bassist Ella Rolf), who released their debut album I Need More earlier this year. We met Kelly and Ella to talk about the album, their musical ancestry in the New York punk scene and the band’s history.
I heard you decided to start the band before any of you could play instruments. So how did that all come together?
Kelly: We were at the same place at the same time, and we were all looking for a way to express creativity. At that point we were at an art school (Gerlesborgs konstskola) and everyone had separate rooms and studios. The idea at that school was that everyone would work with their own individual projects. But we knew each other before, and were already involved in working together. So that’s why we started the band together.
Do you think it makes the band a tighter unit, because you all learned to play instruments at the same time? In other bands where everyone has learned separately they all come into the band with their own styles, but when you all begin playing together it’s more of a joint thing?
Ella: I think in the beginning it was. You feel frustrated when you’re not really able to play your instrument, and we just decided together that we were going to make it work in some way. So we had the same goal.
Kelly: Maybe it’s because you share the same frustration. You want to reach a certain sound or a certain feeling in a song, and if you are not really able to play an instrument and you don’t really know how to make a certain sound, then you get frustrated. And we shared a lot of that frustration.
Ella: And we still do!
Kelly: Yeah, but especially in the beginnings.
So it was a kind of mutual motivation?
Kelly: Exactly
Ella: Yeah.
Another thing I read was that at the time you started the band you were all reading Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk by Gillian McCain and Legs McNeil about the punk rock history of New York. Was that a major period of inspiration starting off, those artists like The Velvet Underground, Patti Smith, Television, Richard Hell?
Kelly: We had a translation in Swedish, so all the swear words were really corny.
Ella: Stuff that people don’t say.
Kelly: Or that they said in the fifties.
Like Richard Hell saying ‘Dra åt hellvete’?
Kelly: Yeah, exactly. So it was funny in that sense also. Ella started to read it, and you read it out loud for us sometimes, when we were just hanging around and did other things, and slowly we started to get a lot of inspiration from the mindset of that time. The musicians of that scene weren’t educated in music, and they had this ‘just go and do it’ attitude. So we adapted that mentality.
Ella: It wasn’t really something we did consciously, it wasn’t like ‘Now we’re inspired by this book!’. It just fell together, and gave us the idea of ‘why not?’.
Kelly: Especially because the book was about musicians that we were also inspired by, so hearing about their way of just starting their bands, and how it was a similar situation to the one that we were in, just made it feel possible.
There’s a big variation in sound on the album, and I especially noticed a development in your style over time. You’ve got your early songs like ‘Rockets’ which have a Velvet Underground ‘Sweet Jane’ rock looseness to them, but then on the newer singles like ‘City’ and ‘Delta Love’ there’s a tighter, more post-punk vibe. Is that a deliberate move, a sign of where you’re headed stylistically?
Kelly: It’s not deliberate I think, but over time you get new inspirations. We were really inspired by The Velvet Underground in the beginning. Not only them of course. But then when we wrote ‘City’ and ‘Hopes In Vain’ it was more post-punk…
Ella: New wave
Kelly: Yeah, bands like Delta 5 and ESG as inspiration. I think it’s not a deliberate thing, you like different bands at different parts of your life, and that affects your own music.
Ella: We don’t have a conscious idea of what we’re supposed to be at all. We can do one song in one way and then another song in another way. That’s what we like.
Kelly: I think it’s more that we’re trying to find a certain sound, or a melody or a feeling, and then create something from it. But we never listen to a song and say ‘Let’s do this’. But I agree that ‘Rockets’ sounds a lot like The Velvet Underground, which makes sense because we were listening to them a lot at that time.
Ella: It was our first song ever, and of course our new songs will sound different from our first songs, even though I still like ‘Rockets’, but more as something from the past.
And you also said in another interview that you write your songs separately, that you’re not a band that sits and jams and works your songs out that way. You generally work out your parts individually. So how does that work out?
Ella: I don’t know if that’s completely correct, but partly. Kelly writes a lot of stuff at home, a lot of the guitar stuff, and then shows us in the rehearsal space. Sometimes she has a clear idea of how she wants the other instruments to be, and sometimes not. It changes a lot from song to song.
Kelly: I think we do jam a little bit, but Sofia prefers to write the lyrics and the song melodies at home by herself. So she is not really a jam person.
Ella: She hates to jam!
Yeah, I think it might have been her quote that said you’re not a jam band.
Ella: Yeah, I think so too.
Kelly: Yeah, she’s really not a jam person. But I think it’s a good thing to just jam a melody or a riff together with bass and drums.
Ella: You kind of have to, when you start to play together. But it’s not like we sit for hours and just jam.
Kelly: Usually, Ella, or me, or Josefina have an idea for something like a guitar riff, or a bass melody, or something like ‘I really like disco drums’, for example, and we just start to play and try to find something that sounds good together.
How was the recording process for I Need More? I heard you just bunkered up over the winter to get it done.
Kelly: It was really intense, which is a good thing and sometimes a bad thing also. We bunkered up and we wrote the songs and recorded them in just a couple of weeks. Our philosophy in the band is pretty much the Please Kill Me philosophy, if you want to do it you should do it. You shouldn’t over-think and over-analyse every aspect of everything. If you want to record a song that you think is good at that point in time you should just do it. It’s not really our thing to just sit for a year or two years and just mix and edit forever, so it would be strange if we did that.
Ella: I mean, it might have sounded different if we had more time, but it’s not really our thing. It’s how it’s always been, that we make stuff really quickly. It’s more interesting to make new things than to linger on the old ones. You love it in the moment, even though there can be always stuff you want to change later on.
Kelly: Usually you don’t want to change the feeling of the song, the intensity or the nerve of the moment is there, and that’s what we’re looking for. Of course, I can listen to ‘Rockets’ or any other song and think ‘Ah, I wanted that little drum part to be a little bit louder, that would have made it so much better’. But it doesn’t make that much difference to the song, if it has the feeling then it’s good.
Because there are some musicians that drive themselves insane, looking for absolute perfection
Kelly: Yeah, and it can give amazing results if you do that type of music, but we don’t. If would be very strange if we did as punk musicians.
Ella: Yeah, it would be a bit hypocritical.
So where did the title I Need More come from? Because it expresses a lot, this sense of ambition and striving for something beyond what you have now, a little more than the ordinary. There’s a lot going on for three words.
Kelly: Some people mistake the title for ‘I Want More’, which is not the same at all. We really like the ‘I Need More’, because it’s not a demand.
More like a compulsion
Kelly: Yeah, you need to. It’s adaptable in many different situations, which is one of the reasons why we adopted the title. It could be I need more from my relationship, I need more from my boring everyday life. There are a lot of different situations where you can relate to it.
Ella: Yeah, and it also says that you shouldn’t be completely content with how everything is. You should always strive for something else, or something more. The idea of what happiness is.
Kelly: It’s also a universal feeling, when you’re young and a teenager, you need something more from life. I think a lot of people can relate to that kind of a feeling. It’s not ‘I Want More’, which more of a greedy thing.
Ella: It’s also just a feeling of frustration. It’s not always that you know what you need, you just know that you need more out of this life.
Kelly: ‘I Want More’ is a greedy demand; ‘I Need More’ is from the heart.
Ella: And that’s what I think music is about, why you make music and it’s why I listen to music. That feeling.
So you released it without a label. Is having ultimate control over your recordings and your released very important to you?
Kelly: It’s the most important. We care about every part of the song, the mixing, the artwork everything.
You also have the two instrumental tracks on the record, ‘Fourteen’ and ‘Origami Club’, which are more abstract soundscapes than the more direct songs on the rest of the album. So what made you want to experiment with that kind of music and is it something you want to do more of in future?
Kelly: I think we looked at the songs that we wrote and tried to put them together in a complete sense, and we added the two, as you say, more soundscapey ones to give a complete wholeness to the album. Some reporters have written that the album is too all over the place, but we wanted it to be that way. Not an album with the same type of song or the same type of recording technique on every track. We wanted it to feel more like a box of candy.
Ella: It’s very us.
It leaves that space between the distinct sections of the album.
Kelly: It’s very thoughtfully put in order. Especially putting ‘Origami Club’ as a kind of a requiem, together with ‘Sea Swallow Me’, which is kind of a sad ending to an album, but is very us.
Ella: Also, I hate the idea of being predictable. And it’s not very predictable to add those songs. Maybe some people would say it’s a bit weird, but I love that.
Because people don’t expect a punk band to have instrumental tracks?
Ella: Exactly.
Kelly: Also those songs, ‘Fourteen’ and ‘Origami Club’. If you get them, and you get the feeling they’re trying to pin down, I think you get our band much more. So the people that actually like our music might like those tracks, because they are just ‘pin down the feeling’ tracks.
And so to wrap up, what are your ambitions for the band over the next few months? What do you want to do, what are you hoping to achieve?
Kelly: Well, the first thing we want to do is to have some quality time together in our rehearsal spot. We’ve had a very intense summer so we just want some time to play and to make new music. So that’s the first thing I think everyone is longing to do.
Ella: So we can add some songs to our live show. And start to make a new album I guess. That’s number one I guess. We have really high ambitions of what we want to do.
Kelly: Yeah, I think we have a lot of new ideas and new feelings that we want to pin down.
Ella: We want to capture it all.
Moon City Boys’ debut album I Need More is out now.
