Since the release of their debut album Idiotologi in 2014, punk five-piece Västerbron’s intense, politically charged rock has established them as one of the most exciting acts in Sweden. They’ve just released a new full-length, Till Vilket Pris Som Helst, and we caught up with singer Peter Jonasson to discuss it.

With the new album, Till Vilket Pris Som Helst, I read that you wanted to record it as exactly ten songs in thirty minutes, what was the idea behind having such a precise plan for how long you wanted it and how many songs were going to be on there?

Well, the truth in that is that we really wanted just ten songs. There’s no need to put out an album with fourteen or fifteen songs, if four of them are only there because the band think ‘Yeah, well we recorded them, so why not have them on the album?’. So we just wanted ten songs. I actually think we had three or four more songs that we recorded, but we decided that we didn’t really like them, so we didn’t want people to listen to or pay for them. We wanted the album to be quality over quantity. There’s no point in having a song that maybe only three or four people will like if we think it sucks and don’t want to have it. We wanted it to be short and leave the listeners wanting more.

So you think it’s worth more to have a short set of powerful songs, than trying to stretch things out too much?

Yeah, exactly. There’s even one song where I don’t sing, it’s an instrumental track (‘Tid För Eftertanke’). That song was originally two minutes and fifty seconds, and we shortened it down, because we thought ‘Yeah, people are going to get bored. We don’t want people to get bored’. That’s kind of our philosophy with the band in general. We don’t play to amuse ourselves. We do enjoy playing, don’t get me wrong. But there are so many bands who go onstage and think ‘ah, we’re on stage now, let’s stay here for fucking ever!’. For us, it’s more ‘We don’t want to waste too much of your time, if you like it you can let us know, and then maybe we’ll play some more’. Because people don’t have the same views on how long they want to listen to music, they want to check their e-mail or something after thirty minutes. So we normally just play for thirty minutes. So then people can go about their social media stuff, maybe even upload a photo of Västerbron on Instagram or whatever.

That’s very accommodating of you. So if you want to tweet at a gig, Västerbron is the one to go for.

Yeah. We might even start introducing social media pauses: “Ok, we’re going to stop for three minutes, send a tweet, Instagram, or just text your granny – we don’t care”. People’s attention spans are so short nowadays.

Let’s talk about ‘Vilse I Varuhuset’. You’ve got the line in the song, “Det är lätt att handla utan konsekvenser”. So is your opinion that we’re now in a society where buying things is like a cheap comfort trip for people, it’s a way of distracting from your problems without really dealing with them, and that’s something we’re encouraged to do?

Yeah, I think it has replaced religion in many ways, and that’s why it was funny to mock Mall Of Scandinavia, because that’s essentially a temple of consumerism. People used to, when they were feeling bad and wanted some relief, have a little prayer, and then it was all fine and dandy. But nowadays, it’s become ‘I must consume’.

So people have turned to comfort shopping instead of prayer?

Yeah. I’m a full-blown atheist. It’s difficult to deal with consumerism as a problem, because it’s essentially the entire western world. That’s actually why we liked the band name Västerbron, because there is a Western Bridge, a flow of people coming into the western world, and maybe we should ask them what they think about it. We’re very quick to judge people from other cultures, but we could also think about what we do wrong. But we don’t, because our attitude is that we’re so damn good. And I’m not sure we are that good. I know a lot of people who are falling downwards into depression. I am an atheist, but now the church has become one of the few safety nets left for people on the bottom. It’s a twisted world man. I don’t believe in the Bible, but for some people it’s something. There’s no holy book of consumerism, people just consume and other people make money out of them. And maybe that’s worse than religion.

Were you surprised when Mall Of Scandinavia threatened to sue over the single’s original name? Or was the point of putting it out there to poke at them a little and see what happened?

Both yes and no. When I was growing up, I was very into adbusting, which is the art of making false ads. I actually forgot how much I enjoyed it, distorting logos. The best example is the famous adbusting of the Shell logo, where people just removed the ‘s’. So when I made the logo for the ‘Mall Av Skandinavien’ record, for the single cover, I knew we were poking them a little but I didn’t actually think they were going to threaten us with legal action. We were a little bit scared, as we don’t have the means to defend ourselves. We’re not a big band, we’re not trying to ‘make it’, we just play. We don’t have money.

So you didn’t exactly have the money for a legal battle with something like Mall Of Scandinavia?

No, and we didn’t want that to define the band either. Sure, we got an article in Aftonbladet about us because of it, but after that we decided that we had gotten our point across, and we wanted to put a lid on it.

And finally, with the new record in the bag, what are Västerbron’s plans for the next few months?

The plan is basically just to play as much as we can and want. Everyone in the band, except me, has a full time office job, so we can’t just play every week and go on long tours. And we sing in Swedish, so going on a European tour isn’t really an option right now. We’re planning a short Norwegian tour, and we have shows coming up in Malmö and Stockholm. And if all goes well we’re going to get back to writing new songs and recording. We’re not in a crazy hurry and we don’t place crazy demands on ourselves to be the best, to write the best songs of all time and stuff like that. We just enjoy it as it comes, and try and have the best time possible.

Till Vilket Pris Som Helst is out now on Playground. Västerbron play Debaser Strand on May 28.