Swedish band The Radio Dept. bring their dream pop melodies to Shanghai and Beijing this week. Since its formation in 1995, the band has released three critically acclaimed albums, each drenched with the requisite amount of shoe gaze soaked fuzz and rock to qualify them cult status – its songs have been featured in a Sofia Coppola film, Marie Antoinette, surely the marker of any respectable indie band.
Yet the band is notorious for its distaste of touring and media interviews. Before its current Asia tour, The Radio Dept. reportedly hadn’t played a gig in three years. And it has been six since their last album, Clinging to a Scheme. To say anticipation is high would be an understatement. So, what do the trio (Johan Duncanson, Martin Larsson and Daniel Tjäder) have planned? Duncanson fills us in.
What's been happening in the world of The Radio Dept since your last album Clinging To A Scheme - in a personal and musical sense?
We’ve all been working on our personal stuff, doing movie scores and working on different music projects. For the last two years we’ve also have been working on our new album, which will be out soon. We’ve spent much time in the studio to make sure this will be our best album up until now. The record is almost finished and we are very happy with the result so far.
We're looking forward to it.. Speaking of your new album - following the last album, your releases seem to be more politically-themed. Do you continue this focus on your new album?
We are not a political band, but we write out lyrics about stuff that matters to us, about things in daily life. Sometimes these subjects have a political undertone, but it’s basically about social matters. Europe is in crisis right now and these things affect our personal lives. I think all of our songs have a deep personal feeling to it and this won’t be any different for this new album. The main subject of the album is life itself and everything that happens around us.
Right. What are the biggest changes you've seen in the recording and music landscape since you started?
So many things have changed since we’ve started this band. If you only think about the way musicians create music, things have changed a lot. Before most of our songs were created in our practice space, but now technology allows us to work from home. This is a good thing because you can write stuff whenever you feel like. However for us it’s also important that the songs work as a whole, so we will still work on our ideas in the studio.
And the dissemination of music?
When we started The Radio Dept. [in 1995] there still wasn’t any digital market. You could spread your music only by selling physical copies on LP, CD or cassettes. Now there is just too much music to discover. It’s difficult to keep a track about what is going on. The bad thing with this is that you have one hit bands that just put a track out, get famous, but not really work on albums anymore. For us it is still important to create albums that we like, because these capture a time frame of our lives.
We’ve not been touring too much lately, so this makes it extra excited for us to come to Asia. It will be great to play China again, because it’s been a while.
Lucky for us. Why is it that you you prefer working in the studio to playing live?
I think for us our main priority has always been music itself. We never compromise our own music and only put things out that we like for the full 100%. We don’t care about deadlines from our labels and don’t feel the need to put out records every year. We like to write music when we feel like [it].
Our personal lives don’t allow us to spend months and months on the road. We’ve feel that we’ve done that in the past. At the end of the day it’s the music that counts and we only want to play shows that we feel like playing. China was wonderful in so many ways, so these two shows in China will be special to us, and probably one of the only shows we will play this year.
We notice you're playing in Mongolia as part of your Asia tour. What other far-flung locations are you keen to tour?
It’s so great that our music can travel so far, we’ve never expected to play in Mongolia, but it seems like we have a solid fan base there. We’ve been invited to play the Playtime Festival [in Mongolia], will be a big thing, so it’s great that we can travel to these new places and discover new cultures. That’s what it is all about. Our lifetime is so short, it would be great to tell my grandchildren some stories some day about all the places that we’ve visit as a band. There are still so many places to discover. [We] would really want to go to some places in South America one day.
If you were radio DJs for a day what would be your perfect playlist?
[Laughs] I don’t think we will ever be on the radio in Sweden, because Swedish radio is the worst in the world. Would be great if we could take over one day, but don’t think that would ever happen. It would be great to have some great deep talks with some of the artists that I admire.
Shanghai: July 1, 9-11pm, RMB180-240. MAO Livehouse, see event listing.
Beijing: July 2, 9pm, RMB180-240. Yugong Yishan, see event listing.
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