The Hives are buzzing about new album and tour
Mike D of the Beastie Boys and Pelle Gunnerfeldt of the Viagra Boys co-produced The Hive's latest album.
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Nicholaus Almqvist is better known to music fans as Nicholaus Arson, lead guitarist and backup vocalist of the Swedish garage punks The Hives.
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The Hives are buzzing about new album and tour Back to video
He formed the band in 1993 with his brother, lead singer Howlin’ Pelle Almqvist. The group were part of a wave of Scandinavian rock acts that came to global prominence in the ’90s, including the Hellacopters, Soundtrack of Our Lives, Refused and others.
The group released its seventh long-player two weeks ago. Its Sept. 16 show at the Commodore Ballroom is sold out.
Titled The Hives Forever Forever The Hives, the 13 new tunes were captured in the legendary Riksmixningsverket, a studio owned by ABBA’s Benny Andersson and at YEAR0001 in Stockholm. The album was co-produced by the band’s longtime producer Pelle Gunnerfeldt, Beastie Boys member Mike D and Queens of the Stone Age frontman Josh Homme.
While new songs such as Paint A Picture or Legalize Living share a studio sheen, Almqvist says the band’s live show remains as raw as ever.
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“For us, touring the world is all about putting on a great high-energy rock show and connecting with audiences wherever we are,” he said. “I never would have believed that we would still be doing this, 32 years later. The idea was maybe release two or three records if we were lucky and then, maybe, be discovered 20 years later as one of the long-forgotten great bands.”
Growing up in small-town Sweden, the members of The Hives were the kids diving into dusty crates of vinyl at second-hand record stores. For the price of one new record, you could get a handful, and this exposed the members to a lot of long-forgotten sounds from Canada and the U.S. that influenced The Hives’ particular brand of super-clean, really fast garage rock.
The members all claim B.C. hockey punkers the Hanson Brothers as a big influence, although its matching suit style fits right in with such legendary acts as The Standells and The Seeds.
“You could go to a record store and get a new punk album of the time for a lot of money, or you could go to the used book store and find boxes of records by old groups from the ’60s and ’70s for much less,” he said. “So we were getting turned on to all of these raw, rowdy sounding garage bands from the ’60s and ’70s at the same time that punk bands were veering into more metal territory. The sound in the 1990s was really heavy and distorted fat guitars with the drums mixed way down in the background and we wanted the kick to boom.”
The band’s tight tunes began developing a strong regional following and eventually led to signing with Swedish indie label Burning Heart at around the time that the label inked a deal with California’s Epitaph Records to get its artists North American distribution.
When The Hives’ second album, Veni Vidi Vicious, arrived in 2000, tracks such as Hate to Say I Told You So and Main Offender were perfectly time to coincide with the so-called rock revival of the early aughts. Main Offender was featured in the Rock Band video game.
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The song is still one of Almqvist’s favourite numbers to perform in-concert.
“We liked the raunchiness of punk mixed with ’60s mod and garage bands and found the sound,” he said. “When we turned up in North America and people were telling us we sounded like the Sonics, we didn’t know who they were. But I really liked that cleaner guitar sound of the 1950s mixed with the volume of the 1960s and punk energy.”
Right from the opening cut Enough is Enough on the new album, you can hear that mix of sounds come together perfectly. The space left for the instruments to breath makes every slashing guitar chord hammered out slice into your ears. Married with a pure power pop chorus hook, the song is two minutes and 46 seconds of pure energy.
Out of the 13 songs, only four clock in at over three minutes.
This helps with putting together a set list. The Hives’ fans have a lot of favourites, and the band can fit a lot of them into a typical concert.
“We leave the set lists to our drummer Chris Dangerous to put together with maybe a few shifts here and there,” he said. “Any time we release a new record, half of the tour set has always been the new songs. We pretty much found our sound back with our debut Barely Legal in 1997, but what we now call ‘neat beat’ with the call-and-response guitar interplay gelled in Tyrannosaurus Hives in 2004.”
He feels like The Hives Forever Forever The Hives is one more stage in a continuing process to strip back the band’s sound to even greater levels of immediacy.
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