VIVA SOUNDS 2024: Memories
Six months away from the 2025 edition, we remember some of the wonderful music from Gothenburg's VIVA SOUNDS 2024
Over the course of my writing, erm, “career”, I have had to join the rat race side of things sometimes, unfortunately, which has meant getting home, or worse still to the office, at like 2am to write a fucking review of a live show that really had to be online the next morning. Otherwise the media vehicle in question wouldn’t be the first to put out a review and it would get less clicks or whatever. So, I hate everything about this scenario. Other writers might have differently wired brains, but for me, the best time to do a review, be it of a live show or even of a record, is a few months after you experience it. With the live show, you get the memories that stuck - if none have, should you be writing about it at all? With the record, you get the hindsight, the having listened to it over a period of time, getting past the initial excitement or indifference, and learned to love it (or not) and discover its real charms, if any. That way, you also get to sort the wheat from the chaff. I am frankly done with doing 3/10 reviews, I’ve always hated writing about stuff I don’t like, and now that most printed music magazines are dead, and the ones that aren’t dead yet are not too fussed with reviews anymore, at least one of the good byproducts of that is that I only get to talk about and recommend you guys stuff I’m really excited about. Anything else, I can simply ignore. As I said, some still stick by the “old” formats of reviewing and that’s fine. But I’m not like that. I want bad vibes and negativity in our music, not in our writing about it.
Okay, rant over, but as you can see, it makes sense, because I will be talking to you about the highlights of a festival I went to in late November 2024. Fortunately, as I have told you before, time and time again, Viva Sounds is special, so a lot of memories still remain quite vivid from several shows. Despite that, however, it’s the experience as a whole that sticks the most. Wandering the wet and dark streets of Gothenburg, hopping on and off the tram, having coffees and great food (Seven Spices Street Deli, I salute you!) and shopping for records in between shows at different small venues… I know, a lot of festivals insist upon the “experience” thing and some of them just use it for the sake of pretentiousness, but navigating Viva Sounds really is an unforgettable adventure. It’s pretty chill, too. Since I used the term “insist” back there, I should point out that this festival does not “insist upon itself”, as Peter Griffin famously described ‘The Godfather’ in this hilarious bit. Everything about it is carefully organised, from the industry networking part of it (the talks are amazing, and not just for music industry nerds!) to the faultless running of all the venues, but it feels like it’s just running itself. The staff is kind and helpful but never overbearing, the communication is fun and relaxed (there’s an app and everything!), the venues range from record stores to little bars to restaurants and cultural centres (as well as a few, well, proper clubs of course), so it barely even feels that you’re at a festival most of the time, in the best possible way. You’re just having fun wandering in and out of little places all day where people are playing cool music.
I know, if you’ve never been, it might be overwhelming to look at the schedule and see like fourteen venues spread across a sheet (and a map), and a good 25 bands a day scattered across those venues of which you might know like seven, because that’s how they roll - there are essentially no huge names, no crowd-pulling headliners, no selling of one genre or one single mood. Small-ish indie bands, up and coming metal bands, singer/songwriters, punk kids and various other weirdos are what makes up 95% of the bill. It’s the festival of the dark horse, in a way. Proud of its cramped spaces and sticky floors. But yeah, as soon as you get there and catch your first shows you settle into a groove of inner peace. The sense of overwhelm disappears. It helps with the logistics bit of it that everything is either within walking distance or within a couple of tram stops of everything else, but most of all, when it clicks, you realise this event is all about the discovery, and you can’t force that. You will kind of pick the stuff you think you might like, wander about, and you’ll come out on the other side full of great memories and new names to check out better later. Viva Sounds goes home with you. It sure did with me, again, and these are the shinier things I brought.
📷: all photos by Estefânia Silva, unless otherwise noted.
Hollow Ship
This is a bit of a cheat/brag, because this was actually a private show. As I told you, the “networking” part of this festival is very important, a lot of people from the music industry attend, and we are extremely well taken care of. After a lovely dinner (and a slightly embarrassing game of bowling) on arrival night, we were swept away to a studio to watch local psych-rockers Hollow Ship play us a few songs from their forthcoming album plus a few choice cuts from their excellent ‘Future Remains’ album. Groovy, chunky rhythms, a funky swagger, heavy Floydian psych, they have all the ingredients of a retro band without ever sounding like one, so they are doing something extremely right. Look out for that album when it’s out - this first sample got a bunch of jaded promoters, writers, PRs and assorted industry folk to bang their heads with smiles on their faces, and that means something.
Ultra Lover
In a nice segue from the previous year, Ultra Lover bassist Daniel Noring also plays in the devastating God Mother, who greatly impressed me in the 2023 edition. While less out-and-out destructive, Ultra Lover are no less intense, as their expansive, post-punk-infused brand of noise rock hits you in the feels straight away - with a sledgehammer. Vocalist Jonas A. Holmberg (who is also in This Gift Is A Curse, by the way), colourful shades and all, is a livewire of expressive restlessness and Ultra Lover end up being a fantastic opening for the legendary The Abyss venue’s proceedings at the festival.
Adjua
After Ultra Lover, I could have stayed at The Abyss and have a beer or twelve more and wait for Blessings, but that’s the thing, Viva Sounds makes you want to do stuff on a whim. For some reason, though I didn’t know her before, the little blurb the app had on Adjua just felt right for some reason, so I ran (well, trammed) to the beautiful Gathenhielmska House cultural centre up the street to check her out, and I’m so glad I did so. First of all, it was my first time inside this venue, and as soon as you get in, it feels immediately intimate, like you’re watching a private show on someone’s living room. Well, if they’re a billionaire that happens to have an 18th century townhouse, but still. It’s not everyday that you go to a show and this is what awaits you when you go past the door, is it?
It’s the kind of room that begs for a sensitive, delicate singer/songwriter, and fortunately the Welsh-born Ghanaian Adjua was exactly that. I called her show “a quiet, surprising highlight shining out among all the noise and electricity and manic energy of all the other bands I saw playing tonight” on an excited Instagram post at the time, but it wasn’t all quietude and peace either. Intimacy and self-reflection are the main things Adjua’s tunes make you feel, but her voice is strong and her songs resonate with a powerful R&B swagger and even a sort of a grungy sneer in the way she rips out some of them chords. Introspective singer/songwriter, yes, but with a bite, and with memorably affecting songs to boot too. She doesn’t have many releases yet, but do check her out when you can.
Blessings
So another quick tram ride back to Blessings and The Abyss was all a-buzzin’ soon as I got back in there. In the nick of time, they were starting that very second - the gods of Viva Sounds were kind! Blessings, on the other hand, weren’t - going straight for the throat with an unlikely mix of unpleasant style, their dissonant savagery provided you as much of a headache as if there was a Today Is The Day and an old Voivod album playing at once on two scratchy turntables. “ANTI-ROCK ACTION”, they proudly declare on their Instagram. Well, after seeing them live, I quite agree.
Oh, and Dino showed up for that show. He pops up sometimes. It’s a whole thing.
Sodakill
See, the festival is chill overall, but then its best shows are absolute butt-kickers. Like, the kind that leaves your butt purple. You know? Like Blessings the day before, and like one of the biggest highlights of the whole weekend, one of the first bands I watched on the second day - the mighty Sodakill! After getting properly pumped up by a great DJ set by Norway-based administrative leader and DJ Rachel Ann Lewis, the place was almost brought down by these Stockholm hellraisers. On the basement of Café Hängmattan, on a tiny stage where the four girls barely fit themselves, they let loose a proper barrage of wildly energetic, harsh and yet curiously melodic and catchy punk. Pop sensibilities, yes, but on fire. Furthermore, when they let their hair down, their metal credentials also come to the fore, with fat fucking riffs that could have come from any quality Sabbath-worshipping gang you can mention. There’s a Misfits t-shirt in there, as you can see in the photo, and that, for once, tells you most of what you need to know.
Karl Vento
After the Sodakill whirlwind, a little comedown was sorely needed, or at least a sit down. Fortunately Viva Sounds tends to always have what you need at any given moment. A quick dash to the beautiful Gathenhielmska once again, and the wonderful Karl Vento (if the name sounds familiar, it’s maybe because he’s played with Anna von Hausswolff for a few years) effortlessly whisked us all away into another dimension. Frankly, if it was up to me, I’d still be there, sitting in that beautiful room, listening to this beautiful man in his socks conjure up barely-there songs from just his guitar and voice. His minimalist folky balladry is so free of any clutter that it feels the Swedish musician is distilling the actual fulcral components of a song into their final form. For once, calling a show “dreamy” isn’t an exaggeration.
Nora Lucia / Jenobi
The second day actually started earlier than usual with two perfect shows to get things going, with two cool Swedish artists playing in the relaxed environment of the Andra Långgatans Skivhandel, the kickass record store next door to The Abyss. Nora Lucia’s poppy folk, led by singer/songwriter Nora Lundgren, and the lone Jenobi, Jenny Apelmo Mattsson’s nom de guerre, with her beefier, rockier songs, provided a perfect kickstart of the day, within the perfect setting. Nora Lucia was laidback and lighthearted, though heartfelt, and I admit I was actually browsing through some records in the back shelves while listening to the show at one point - no disrespect at all, rather the opposite, and it felt right to just be assaulted by music in several ways at that point, and Nora Lucia are the ideal kind of non-intrusive yet real music to work like that. Jenobi demands a little more exclusive attention, and it was wonderful to see her feel the space all on her own with her quirky, jaunty songs mostly off her latest album ‘Irregularity’. In the end, I left with heart full, and wallet a little emptier because it turns out Sweden is a good place to stock up on a few Swedish cult classics I have missing in my collection.
Vera Sola
I’ll be completely honest, I had heard Vera Sola in passing before the festival and it didn’t really stick. I heard it because it sounded like the kind of Americana-infused sort of thing that I tend to be a sucker for, but I went through a couple of songs off ‘Peacemaker’ and they didn’t register much on the old emotion-o-meter. Just goes to show that with some artists, you have to see them live to really get it. It was the last show of the night for me, so being the tired old man I am, I began watching while sitting down on a couch at the back of the room (the upstairs room at the Puistervik, another beautiful venue - goddamn it, Gothenburg, you’re making most other cities look bad!), but as the first song progressed, I was immediately drawn to the front of the stage. Danielle Aykroyd is a real whirlwind on stage - she sways, she stares, she truly becomes the characters in her dusty roadside kind of stories, a Tarantino-esque presence that’s as much psychedelic as it is very rock’n’roll. There’s a Holly Williams-esque grit to her, and it’s instantly captivating. So much so that ‘Peacemaker’, and ‘Shades’ also that I now went back to properly discover, now sound so much cooler than they did without the images of her terrific performance. I didn’t go back to the couch again, no matter how my back hurt!
Iskandr Moon
The last day of Viva Sounds was a veritable rollercoaster and in itself a perfect example of why this festival is essential if you’re into discovering and exploring different, alternative music. From 3pm to 1am, my entire day was spent hopping between venues, watching artist after exciting artist, ranging from quiet folky loners to raging black metal powerhouses, coming from all points of Europe, from Latvia to Belgium. Unlike what would have happened in other places, I wasn’t a wreck towards the end - not only are all the places easy to get to, but some of them are actually bars and restaurants too. So it was cool to have a bite and even sit down during some of the shows. But first, back to the Andra Långgatans Skivhandel record store for a nice little musical wakeup by a Belgian gentleman called Iskander Moens, aka Iskandr Moon, who sang soft poppy songs behind his keyboard. It was simple, uncluttered music, perfect for the setting, for the time of day, and direct to the heart. I can see this gentleman becoming widely known once he has his debut album out - at this time he only has the ‘Are You Lost Here?’ EP out, so it was a brave booking, but one that really paid off.
Bēdu Brāļi
Without leaving the record store (which was harder than it sounds, with all those amazing special editions looking from the shelves and silently calling me all the time), we completed that Belgium - Latvia trip, with the arrival of Bēdu Brāļi. While ideal for a lone artist, the cramped “stage” (i.e., the shop entrance) seems less so for a whole band, but the quirkiness of the trio soon gave the feeling that they were right at home there. Theirs is an interesting clash of styles, an agile motorik-driven kind of post-punk which also veers into a sort of drify, psychedelic shoegaze and even some loose punk rock vibes on their most vital moments. It’s ultimately hard to define and has a tendency to keep you constantly bopping even when you’re trying to record shop in between (not saying I was, but goddamnit, the shop is good). They’ve released a really cool new album since, called ‘Lauskas’, and though I didn’t get a look at the setlist at the time, I actually think most of it already consisted of songs from this one. Oh, it was also their first performance outside Latvia, though you wouldn’t say if you saw how natural they looked while playing.
Flypaper
That little corner you see there in the pic is in fact the entire stage at the Holy Moly, which is in fact a very cool little bar and restaurant, perfect for a Saturday cocktail, beer and tacos night out. During Viva Sounds, it becomes one of the venues too, and it’s charming if you do get there early. The emphasis is on little, which makes for shows there to be always very cramped even if only twenty people show up. More than that did for Flypaper, which happens to be London-based singer/songwriter Rory Sear. Wandering the landscape somewhere between M. Ward and Elliott Smith, his songs are sad, morose even, carrying a significant emotional weight but never really becoming melodramatic. There’s a certain cynicism, a sense of self-effacing that is very Elliott-y too. Another really good discovery, and it also feels like we’re getting in on the ground floor still. Go give the gentleman a listen now.
Dylan Robert
Another show, another venue, another little walk - the 2Lång is a really cool place for live music, stand-up, theatre and other cultural activities (it’s actually where a lot of the panels also took place, on the networking side of the festival), and it’s situated right across the street from The Abyss and the Andra Långgatans Skivhandel record store. If you’re starting to hate Gothenburg out of sheer jealousy of its multitude of amazing venues all within spitting distance of each other, trust me, I know how you feel. Anyway, the afternoon was entirely dedicated to a special UK takeover, with the awesome John Kennedy (of Radio X), an habitual Viva Sounds presence, acting as host and presenting every band throughout the afternoon. To be absolutely honest, John himself was the highlight of this event-within-the-event. We even got live football scores and everything. It would have been great to be there even without any bands. He deserves his own pic, here:
I did manage to see a bit of all the bands featured while wandering in and out on the way to see other stuff too, but the one that most remained was actually the very first one, a lad called Dylan Robert, a Liverpool native whose name was inspired by, yes, Bob Dylan and who also grew up a few streets away from John Lennon’s childhood home. He never really had a chance to do anything else but pick up a guitar and go on stage, did he? Fortunately he’s good at it. There’s a certain Ed Harcourt-esque whimsy to him, that kind of broken-hearted funny man, perhaps not as fiery as Ed but with a similar voice and feeling when playing. From what I’ve seen he frequently plays with a band, but it worked much better, in my opinion, to see him all alone on stage, his well crafted songs gain a much deeper poignancy.
Fox Womb
So far, it had been a very nice day with food, walks and mostly quiet music, even considering the subdued electricity of Bēdu Brāļi. That’s when the brain starts screaming “SATAN!” at you and demands violence, so cross the street we did to go into The Abyss, which always provides. Chaos was being served by locals Fox Womb, and their Converge-esque mashing of metal and hardcore did the same job as God Mother had done the year before. Vocalist Simon Romberg also comes from the same school for insane frontmen as all the best in this style do, and he spent more time screaming his head off in the audience milimetres away from people’s faces than he did actually being on stage. The band churned away big fast riff after big fast riff, like Entombed drowning in a vat of cocaine, and in the end much sweat was shared by all.
Hilning
Thing is, once you let Satan into your heart, he demands more, so at this point, on the last hours of Viva Sounds, the devil inside just commanded fuck indie rock, fuck other venues, fuck everything else. METAL, NOW. So we had a pint or fifteen more and hung around for Hilning to give us some proper Swedish black metal. That they did, without much need for flair or even originality, that’s not really the point of Hilning. Usually a one-man project lead by Andreas Baier (whom you might recognise from grinders Afgrund or the excellent Besvärjelsen), here known as Aldriendir, the whole vibe is a Kampfar-esque kind of snow-swept epic thing, but the actual execution is more down to earth and more within the typical confines of second wave BM. However, the transition to full live band and the rendition of their songs is very well put together and the songs sound powerful, rousing and very inspiring on stage. If you’re having any second thoughts about it, well, then you actually can see the whole show for yourself:
BAST
So for the last band, I struck a deal with Satan in my heart and we went for some pitch-black, dead-hearted darkness that wasn’t necessarily metal. BAST were playing at the beautiful Puistervik (if you haven’t been counting, that’s the fifth different venue of the day) long into the night, appropriately, and it was their first show too. It was a perfect closer, not only to the day, but to the whole festival, and hell, it would have been a nice ending to life itself too. The duo play a kind of deceptively emotionless, ruthlessly cold darkwave, the beats and the synths of John Lönnmyr relentlessly driving things ahead as the passionless vocals of Daniel J intone dead-inside lyrics to songs named ‘It Hurts’ or ‘I’m Still Holding On To Something We Call Love’. Somehow, despite this simple synth+vocals approach being something everyone and their grans have been doing for decades, these guys make it sound fresh and exciting and stylishly sombre. Did we mention it was their very first show, too? Bloody hell. Pay attention to these people. And see? Deals with Satan pay off, children. As do visits to Viva Sounds. Start planning yours! The 2025 edition is in full steam already and you can check out everything here. November 27-29 in Gothenburg, mark the date. See you there!
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