The Cardigans legend Nina Persson has spoken to NME about the band’s return to London, while looking back on surviving the highs and lows of the ’90s and contemplating new material in light of a new generation of fans.
The Swedish indie veterans will be performing at Hammersmith Eventim Apollo on Saturday (June 27), marking their UK show of 2026 and first in the country since 2018. This will be a special early doors show with a 9pm curfew, so fans can still catch England’s World Cup match against Panama.
Chatting to NME from on the road in Barcelona, frontwoman Persson told us about how much the band had been enjoying their 2026 tour so far given less pressure and being in more of a celebratory mood.
“It’s been really nice, she said. “We’ve been playing up to 10 shows a year for the last 14 or 15 years. It’s not really a big or special reason. One thing might be that we are absolutely noticing the wave of attention for the ‘90s, so we’re getting more requests at the moment. That doesn’t usually last long, so we’re happy to play while it’s working!”
The band formed in 1992 and made their debut with 1994’s ‘Emmerdale’. The single ‘Lovefool’ served as a major international breakthrough in 1996, reaching Number Two in the UK and dominating US airplay after being included in Baz Luhrmann’s classic Romeo + Juliet. Further hits followed with the massive ‘My Favourite Game’, ‘Erase/Rewind’ and ‘Hanging Around’ from the genre-smashing 1998 classic ‘Gran Turismo’, but they went on hiatus after the release of their sixth studio album ‘Super Extra Gravity’ in 2005.
They returned to tour in 2012, albeit without guitarist Peter Svensson who has gone on to find massive success as the producer and songwriter behind huge singles by the likes of The Weeknd, One Direction, Ariana Grande, Carly Rae Jepsen, Troye Sivan, Ellie Goulding and many more.
While recent years have seen a huge resurgence in ’90s nostalgia, The Cardigans have spent the last decade meeting a new generation of fans long before Pulp and Oasis reunited.
“I see it at our shows now,” Persson told NME. “There are the kids of the generation that were with us back in the day, but also a lot of kids discovering it on their own. Beyond being an artist, I was working as a teacher for a couple of years in a music conservatory in Copenhagen, plus I have a 15-year-old son who’s obsessed with music and he’s just playing everything we loved in the ‘90s from 4AD and that stuff. It’s all over the place and it’s great. ”
Alongside “the magnitude and the life of its own” of forever viral single ‘Lovefool’ and the band’s run of bangers, Persson also put their continued relevance down to the nature of the band’s production.
“We were using a lot of retro instruments and production with synths, brass and strings. We were not really the traditional guitar-driven amplified ‘90s band,” she said. “Emotionally and sentimentally we belong in the ‘90s, but it’s not like you can listen to it and say it sounds like then. We could have been from any time.”
Returning to that era for the setlist, Persson admitted overcoming a “really difficult” relationship with their early material.
“I felt like I wanted to abandon those songs quite quickly,” she said. “They were so juvenile in many ways, but I wouldn’t call them that any more. I was very young when we made a lot of these songs so I felt like I needed to move on. I felt like I needed to run, I wanted to grow up and go darker. I was tired and felt like I couldn’t live up to my image. I spent a long time thinking that I’d never play a lot of these songs again. With time, it just sort of washes out. It’s not that important for me to tightly identify with those songs. Over time, I’ve come to feel that all these eras are in me and there’s no real hierarchy.”
She continued: “I’m also humble to the fact that we’re totally here on nostalgic grounds. People still think we’re a good band and we can stand our ground, but it’s not like we’ve made any new material in a long time. It’s fine to play this old music and it’s fine that it’s not like something I’d have written today. It’s not as serious this time around.”
Not only that, but Persson a new sense of duty to air their hits, along with a pride and pleasure in bringing them to new audiences.
“In a lot of ways, I wish I’d felt more like this when I was very young,” she said. “This music has to be done, we made it and I love it. If it ends up on the same playlists as Olivia Rodrigo, Billie Eilish and Sabrina Carpenter, then I’m so proud to be there. These are great artists and it’s a good place to be.”
April saw The Cardigans share in stage in Mexico with fellow ’90s icons still going strong Garbage, Alanis Morissette and Natalie Imbruglia – a line-up that Shirley Manson hailed as “a bill of strong feminine energy together at a time when we are all feeling the escalating hate directed against women at large”. Speaking to NME back in 2024, Manson opened up about being driven “insane” by the “soul-destroying” impact of being made to feel that there wasn’t enough space for her as a woman in rock in the ’90s.
“I share the experience that Shirley’s talking about,” said Persson. “I didn’t know her back then, we met and hung out recently in Mexico which was lovely to finally get to know each other. It’s so bad, because we shared the exact same experience but we could have had each other back then. I would have never guessed she was experiencing that. We were like islands back then. We were singled out, and we were also gravitating towards each other.
“We were women in a band of men, which gave an air of being very, ‘I’m with the band, I’m with the boys’. That radiated from the time.”
Asked about coming through it and seeing changes on the other side, Persson replied: “It is what it is. The ‘90s was a lot. It absolutely had that misogyny, but it also had a lot of lovely things. I feel now that it’s healing in retrospect. Things are very different now, and that’s great. It’s been growing on me how different it was back then the more things change. It’s therapeutic to have all these young kids around me being so curious about the ‘90s and having the most specific questions about things.
“In certain ways they worship it, but also when I tell stories they’re like, ‘Oh my god, that’s crazy, how could they let that happen?’ I feel good. Time is healing in every single way. It’s just really fun to revisit this with all the young folks. I feel like they’re picking up on all the great things about the ‘90s, which is only a warm place to be. It’s very cool.”
Is there anything she would personally would have done differently?
“I don’t believe in regrets very much to be honest,” Persson replied, “but this is something I think you could ask to anyone my age and they would say: ‘I wish I had enjoyed it more. I wish I hadn’t have got so furious. I wish I didn’t overthink things so much’.
“I know I’m not alone in that. That’s a real regret because time is limited. I see it with my kid and his friends, there’s nothing you can do about it – it just hurts to be young. You can’t change that. You just do it because you have to.”
The band are no stranger to a Black Sabbath or Ozzy Osbourne cover, having famously put their unique spin on ‘Iron Man’, ‘Sabbath Bloody Sabbath’ and ‘Mr Crowley’ – even getting the approval of the man himself. Their take on ‘Iron Man’ is back in the set, taking on a new weight since the icon passed away last year.
“We were not doing the Black Sabbath cover for a long time, but when he passed it came to be a bit of an homage to him,” said Persson. “I ended up watching all of the ‘Back To The Beginning’ festival from start to finish and getting back into him. We met him a couple of times, so Ozzy and Black Sabbath are a part of our band as well.”
But will fans hear new material at the upcoming shows? They previously ruled out the chances of returning to the studio since Svensson’s departure. Does that still stand?
“We talk about how funny it would be to make new music all the time,” Persson revealed. “It’s not really a matter of whether we’d enjoy it or not, but we always get stuck in the sorting out and discussing how the hell we would do it and how we’d find the time. People have different jobs and kids, I’ve just moved back to New York. We always end up sitting with our heads in our hands going, ‘but how?’
“We’re not closing any doors, but we’ll see if we ever figure out the logistics.”
With Svensson’s Midas touch as a hitmaker now, are there any of his multi-million selling singles from the last decade or so that they wishes he’d saved for The Cardigans?
“No, not really,” Persson laughed. “This is just me speaking personally, but I’m happy that he could go off elsewhere and make those hits. I think they’re brilliant and whenever I hear one I can immediately tell that it was a Peter song. These songs are better for other artists rather than us, so it’s great that he can work with these really poppy artists that aren’t as band-based.”
As well as famously teaming up with Manic Street Preachers for their massive ‘Your Love Alone Is Not Enough’ in 2007, Persson has stayed very busy this side of the century as a solo artist – most recently with her acclaimed collab album with James Yorkston. While admitting that she “pretty happy” that Cardigans are currently quite busy without her “having a proper job”, Persson said that she was in no rush to make more new music or re-enter the music industry.
“My whole career, things have just happened by chance and it’s been amazing,” said Persson. “Right now, I’m really happy that we can play with The Cardigans. Part of me is a little tired and uninterested in being part of the business.
“Playing live is fantastic, but to make a record and figure things out is something else. I don’t have enough ideas to motivate me to stick my head into that right now. I’ve said that before, and then suddenly I’ll have an idea.”
The Cardigans headline an early show at London’s Eventim Apollo in Hammersmith on Saturday June 27. Visit here for tickets and more information.