Viagra Boys

Cave World Viagra Boys

Stockholm post-punk band Viagra Boys release their new album Cave World via YEAR0001. Produced by past collaborators Pelle Gunnerfeldt (The Hives, The Knife, etc.) and DJ Haydn.

As 2021's Welfare Jazz was earning rave reviews from the likes of Pitchfork, NPR, GQ, NME, Stereogum, Fader, and more, Viagra Boys were in the midst of rerecording what would become their followup. After putting together an entire album at the legendary Silence Studio in the town of Koppom, the band decided they could push harder. "We let it marinate for a while and then rerecorded absolutely everything," Sebastian Murphy explains. Some of the music made it through to what would become Cave World, but replacing the lyrics. In that iterative process, Murphy found himself returning time and again to a misconception with deeper roots: the idea that humanity is moving forward. After watching a video late one evening about a theory that suggests evolution involved trading in some cognitive abilities for others, Murphy began stewing on the fact that the result was mass shootings and science denial. "I just wrote down, 'Who is the true ape?'" he says. "People look down at apes as primitive life forms, but we're just this horrible, lazy society killing each other and starting wars, while they're able to love and feel. Does that make them the true ape or us?"