Sad Day For Puppets
Swedish indie-pop purists Sad Day For Puppets release their eagerly-awaited debut album ‘Unknown Colors’ on Monday, 1st of June through Sonic Cathedral. The quintet will also be over in the UK for a series of shows in May, starting off at The Great Escape on the 16th May. Full details are below.
The album includes the new single ‘Cherry Blossom’ (released on May 18) as well as the universally acclaimed ‘Marble Gods’, which was named Single Of The Week on Steve Lamacq’s BBC 6Music show. It narrowly missed out on a similar accolade with Radcliffe & Maconie on BBC Radio 2 and was showered with praise by The Guardian, NME and Drowned In Sound among many others.
The 13 tracks on ‘Unknown Colors’ demonstrate the band’s full range of influences and songwriter Martin Källholm’s seemingly effortless ability to write classic indie-pop tunes. So, as well as the obvious Dinosaur Jr and Primitives influences of the singles, there is the hazy, Mazzy Star beauty of ‘All The Songs’ and ‘When The Morning Comes’ and the dusty, Mojave 3 heartbreak of ‘Withering Petals And Dust’ and ‘Lay Your Burden On Me’, both of which feature lovely, languorous pedal steel. The most important influence on the album, however, is something much more simple: melody. “Our music is not so much the result of a plan as it is a reflection of what music we were listening to when we were kids,” Martin told NME in the band’s recent Radar feature. “It’s not even that important to me, it’s the melodies that count.”
‘Unknown Colors’ (the spelling a comment on Sweden’s deference to American culture) first saw the light of day on small Swedish label HaHa Fonogram late last year, but the UK edition has a new cover and will feature bonus tracks ‘When You Tell Me That You Love Me’ and ‘Saddest Cloud’.
Sad Day For Puppets were formed in 2006 in the Stockholm suburb of Blackeberg, when prodigiously talented songwriter and guitarist Martin Källholm joined forces with fellow guitarist and Dinosaur Jr obsessive Marcus Sandgren and singer Anna Ekland. Taking their unusual name from a Swedish TV show (“There was a puppet show that didn’t go down too well,” explains Martin), the trio eventually began recording and playing shows with bassist Alex Svenson-Metes and drummer Micael Back.
By 2008, thanks to their mutual friends the Television Personalities, they had been handpicked to support MGMT on their Scandinavian dates. They played their first UK shows in February 2009 and, in turn, they were followed by the success of debut UK single ‘Marble Gods’.
Their sound is deceptively simple and all the fuzz and feedback fails to hide the strong melodies and heavenly harmonies that are at once brand new and instantly familiar, bringing to mind a number of disparate influences from the aforementioned Dinosaur Jr to The Primitives, Madder Rose, Lush, Belly, Mojave 3, Mazzy Star and many more. However, Martin is dismissive of such trivial comparisons, saying that the band’s songs just happen to mirror the music they grew up listening to; he claims to draw inspiration from something a lot older than just the indie scene of the early-’90s. “Everything I like about Swedish music can be traced back to old lullabies and psalms and hopefully there’s a little bit of that in our music,” he says. “But I think any time is a good time for guitars and feedback.”
Prior to the album’s release, the band play the following UK dates:
Brighton Great Escape (May 16)
London Bardens Boudoir (May 19)
Manchester Irish Centre (May 20)
Liverpool Sound City (May 21)
Crewe Volume Festival (May 22)