Never mind the ABBA, here’s Millencolin, Swedish punk rockers

THEY got burnt at the now-defunct Soundwave festival, but Millencolin are back to play the first country that gave them a gold record outside Scandinavia.

Millencolin are keeping it together: ‘It’s kind of complicated to live and do this with the same guys for almost 25 years.’

AFTER releasing their first album of new material in seven years in 2015, Swedish punks Millencolin are embarking on their first Australian tour since performing at what turned out to be the last Soundwave Festival tour in February last year.

True Brew, which was released in April 2015, is the band’s first album since 2008 and has been hailed by fans and critics as a return to the Southern Californian-flavoured punk that characterised the band’s early work such as 1994 debut album Tiny Tunes and 1995’s Life on a Plate. When asked why there was such a long period between albums this time around, lead guitarist Mathias Farm says “I guess we’ve been working a lot”.

“We released (the album) Machine 15 back in 2008 and we toured that for two years, and in 2010 we started a world tour on the 10-year anniversary of Pennybridge Pioneers, so we toured on that for two year, then we kept on touring, we toured the whole time,” he says. “We just didn’t really have the time to do anything new. Then we sat down and it took us nearly a year to do the new album. We’ve been busy; it seems — for people outside the band — seven years is a very, very long time but for us it feels like it’s been like a year.”

Millencolin have been ‘working a lot’, hence the delay between albums.

Millencolin – which also comprises singer and bassist Nikola Sarcevic, rhythm guitarist Erik Ohlsson and drummer Fredrik Larzon — have not had any personnel changes since Larzon solidified the line-up when he joined the band in 1993. Farm admits tempers occasionally fray, but says after more than two decades together, band members innately know when to give each other space.

“We clash sometimes, with every relationship you have, people don’t think the same all the time but the health of the band has never been this good,” he says. “We’re enjoying what we’re doing more and I guess you learn so much over the years how to have a good time and to understand each other. It’s kind of complicated to live and do this with the same guys for almost 25 years. It’s kind of crazy but it feels good too. I’m very proud of this and I think we all are.”

Farm admits the focus on the band’s back catalogue – which in addition to the 10th anniversary tour for Pennybridge Pioneers has included vinyl reissues of early albums Life on a Plate and For Monkeys – helped inform the writing process for True Brew.

“It actually did (inform our songwriting) in a way,” he says. “On Machine 15, we did a thing that we couldn’t do any further and we felt like we wanted to do something a little bit more back to our roots and also capture what we were doing live on the record. It was very fun to do this and it’s actually the first album we also produced ourselves. That was a new thing for us and I’m very proud of the outcome of the album. It captures the Millencolin sound in a very good way.”

Australia was the first country Millencolin toured outside Scandinavia.

Australia was one of the first countries outside Sweden to truly embrace Millencolin, and the band have developed a loyal fan base here since they first toured the country 20 years ago. In fact, Australia was the first territory where the band received a gold record for album sales, for Pennybridge Pioneers, a feat they hadn’t even managed in Scandinavia at that time.

“It’s the first country we went outside of Scandinavia, back in 1996. We got two gold albums in Australia, too, and it’s been amazing, truly amazing for us,” Farm says. “It’s kind of weird in a way because it’s such a long way from home but it’s also a place that I love to visit because people are like Europeans in Australia but it has a more tropical climate. It’s the best of two worlds in a way.”

Sarcevic writes the majority of Millencolin’s songs, but Farm says he took a lead role in the production of the new album and although he has almost two decades of experience recording for other artists, he admits doing the same for his own band was a daunting task.

“We have our own studio called Sound Lab studios and I’ve been producing and recording stuff since 1997. I’ve done a lot of stuff for (influential Swedish punk label) Burning Heart Records so it’s a kind of natural thing for me to do that but it’s kind of scary, too, to do it on your own band’s stuff.

“You have to trust your instincts to know when it’s good or bad and to be in charge of the whole recording is also kind of stressful in a way, but it was worth it. I worked on this for a year and put a lot of effort to it.

“We all contributed in our own ways, but it’s mainly me and Nicola doing all the songs and the other guys are doing other stuff, but we share everything four ways anyway, it’s a brotherhood.”

The political climate in Sweden and Europe at large has had an effect on the band.

Millencolin have never been known as a particularly political band, but there is a darker, more serious tone to some of Sarcevic’s lyrics this time around, notably on single Sense and Sensibility (“This state of mind is hard to get through/It makes me hate as much as you do/And clearly makes me see/You’re just a racist clown to me”), which takes aim at the rise of right-wing political movements in Europe.

“The political climate in Sweden has been very, very bad in the last year or two and it’s still bad,” Farm says. “People are just thinking about their own situation and they don’t care much about other people’s suffering.

“When we recorded the album it was elections in Sweden. The climate in Sweden has changed a lot in the last 10 years. The more right-wing politics have gotten a lot of votes in the last election, just because they had a lot of immigrants in Europe from the war in Syria, and some people don’t like that. Of course I don’t have a problem with it but sometimes people are threatened by other cultures and we felt it was time to write something about that.”

Just ahead of their Australian tour, Millencolin released a four-song EP – also called True Brew — which includes the title track from the new album, new tracks Balanced Boy and Heart Vs Mind, and Inte Vara Ägd, which is a Swedish-language version of True Brew.

“It’s a cool little thing to release, to get some new stuff out and also the Swedish version is fun for people from abroad to listen to us sing in Swedish because it sounds like the chef from The Muppet Show I guess,” Farm laughs.

Millencolin were last in Australia to play Soundwave Festival in 2015. Earlier this year, festival promoter AJ Maddah announced the cancellation of the festival. When asked if he was surprised when he heard about the festival’s demise, Farm rapidly replies, “Not really.”

“I loved that festival and we had such a good time playing it but we kind of noticed something was wrong just afterwards because we never got paid,” he says. “We got some money but we got screwed over kind of bad. For us to get down to Australia costs a lot of money and also the crew have to get paid, they always get paid. But we never really got the money we were promised. Some other bands got hit much harder than we were but still, we noticed something was wrong.

“It’s a pity because I liked that festival and also the guys that ran it were good people. I guess there will probably be some other big tour that will fill that space. We used to do that thing called Big Day Out and (Maddah) bought Big Day Out, too. We survived but it was kind of bad.”

Nevertheless, Farm says he and his bandmates are looking forward to returning to Australia and can’t wait to play the new songs live.

“It’s the first club tour in Australia for seven or eight years. We’re a better band now than we’ve ever been, we have a better live act and it’s going to be an unforgettable night.”

Millencolin play Coolangatta Hotel Saturday, April 30, oztix.com.au; and The Tivoli, Sunday May 1, ticketmaster.com.au

Millencolin say they weren’t properly remunerated for playing the last Soundwave.