At long last, music lovers the world over are about to be blessed with a new record from Sweden’s Acid House Kings. I, for one, am ecstatic.
5+ years have passed since the release of their utterly brilliant release ‘Sing Along With Acid House Kings’, which Allmusic itself claimed to be “one of the best releases, indie or not, of 2005”. At the time, I thought for sure that this Stockholm group was poised to take over North America as the front runner of the sun-shiny indie pop genre. Take some Belle & Sebastian, add a bit of The Cardigans, and toss in plenty of Scandinavian quirkiness, and you’ve got a formula for simply irresistible catchy pop music.
And then they went silent.
But finally, their 3rd full length album will be released on March 22nd entitled ‘Music Sounds Better With You’.
Now, it’s not as if they’ve been sitting on their rumps for half of a decade. Instead, they actually began recording the album in 2008 and within three months had half of it done. But being the perfectionists that they are, all of that progress was scrapped citing that an uncertainty that this new collection of songs would be better than ‘Sing Along With Acid House Kings’ and considered them to be both too dark and not melodic enough.
In a recent interview, band member Johan Angergård said “We’ve allowed ourselves to be extremely self-critical. Songs good enough for any of our other albums have been discarded repeatedly.”
They stepped away from it, worked on side projects, and gave it another go in early 2010. And we’ve got our first taste of it at last:
Acid House Kings – “Are We Lovers Or Are We Friends”
With so much time in the making plus a complete do-over, our ears are in for a treat if ‘Music Sounds Better With You’ can even marginally be better than ‘Sing Along With Acid House Kings’ which boasts these gems: