The subversively sleazy Stockholm post-punk band walks a delicate satirical line between provocation and trolling.
Punk bands are a lot more careful with their satire than they used to be. Decades ago artists like The Fall or Nick Cave could get a pass for dropping racial slurs on the assumption of good intentions, but these days even punk’s most subversive acts respect some basic sensitivities, at least the ones looking for play outside of edgelord circles and 4chan. For bands like Stockholm’s Viagra Boys, whose values are basically progressive but whose presentation is brutalist and debauched, those shifting mores pose a challenge: how to provoke without offending or trolling. Theirs is a delicate satirical walk; everything about the band is an exercise in insinuating bad taste without crossing the line into it.
They’ve certainly perfected their visual presentation. Frontman Sebastian Murphy has one of rock’s all-time great bad postures, an antagonistically dismissive slouch he put to memorable use in the band’s breakout video for “Sports.” On stage you’re likely to find him shirtless, wearing the dark sunglasses of the permanently hungover, shimmying his hips in a mockery of sexual suggestion or pouring beer over his protruding, tattooed belly. In the studio, Viagra Boys conjure that sleaze even without the visuals, thanks in part to Murphy’s slovenly growl—he’s got the wanton vocal presence of a man who’s never flossed. The band’s post-punk rhythms are also embellished with cartoonish lasciviousness, slow and gnarly, scribbled with unruly saxophones that overrun portions of songs where horns usually don’t belong.
On the band’s 2018 debut Street Worms they lampooned toxic masculinity and classism, both of which remain targets on their chaotically jubilant sophomore album Welfare Jazz. But increasingly, Murphy directs his aim at the mirror, too, calling himself out for his own dickish behavior. Over the album’s nastiest groove on opener “Ain’t Nice,” he plays the role of the shitty boyfriend, negging his partner while using their pad as his personal storage unit. A few songs detail his quest to be a better person, often in lyrics cribbed from hoary old songwriting tropes. He saves the most contrived of them all for “Into the Sun,” where Murphy apologizes to the love he’s wronged, vowing to end his rambling ways and win back their heart. Even without the cliches, his pledge is transparently unconvincing.
As always, the band brushes against the boundaries of good taste. On “Toad,” Murphy bellows like an old bluesman—or an exaggerated impression of white rockers imitating old bluesmen—about how he don’t need no woman. He adopts a similarly racially loaded impression for the spoken-word snippet “This Old Dog.” On “Creatures,” a glowering slab of synth-pop, he details the squalid existence of unemployed addicts surviving on scrap metal and stolen copper. His portrayal isn’t without empathy—Murphy has been there, he sings—but it plays into the most parasitic stereotypes of society’s have-nots. There’s an air of exploitation to it.
And for a band that so deftly mocked bourgeois interests like dog shows on their debut, there’s a sense that sometimes the band is punching down on a handful of tracks that take the piss out of country music, traditionally the music of the lower working class. Amyl and the Sniffers’ Amy Taylor joins the band for a looney cover of the late John Prine’s “In Spite of Ourselves” that splits the difference between tribute and mockery, with Murphy and Taylor competing to throw down the loopiest, most exaggerated Southern accents.
Is the cover satire, or, like the absurdist death-disco banger “Girls & Boys,” is it just silliness for the sake of silliness? As with much of Welfare Jazz, it’s not always clear, but Viagra Boys are a better band because they give themselves the freedom to do both, and between Murphy’s big-bad-wolf bellow and those untamed horns, even the band’s most corrosive material whizzes by with the invigorating loopiness of a cartoon. Viagra Boys have a gift for making listeners wrestle with choices that might be deal breakers if the music weren’t all so ludicrously entertaining.
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