Viagra Boys’ previous full-length ‘Cave World’, a hyperactive and hilarious takedown of incels and conspiracy theorists, closed with enthusiastic instructions, courtesy of ‘Return To Monke’: “leave society, be a monkey.” While the track satirises the regressive worldviews of the aforementioned lost souls, in typically nuanced Viagra Boys fashion, it also acknowledges the widely felt appeal of abandoning society in a world where “everybody’s worried about the future”.
The Stockholm band’s latest album ‘viagr aboys’ sees them attempt to follow their own advice. According to frontman Sebastian Murphy, their fourth LP is a “simple and stupid” album, led from the off by the title’s linguistic chaos. He explained that “the whole political thing was exhausting”, implying that these 11 new tracks represent his lyrical voice turning inwards, away from socio-political madness and onto the simple stupidity of day-to-day existence.
However, much like how life today all-too-often feels, Viagra Boys’ new album is unable to ignore contemporary anxieties. Numerous tracks see Murphy set up a mundane, first-person situation, such as a trip to the vets on ‘Uno II’, or a health scare on ‘Pyramid of Health’, but digress into thoughtful, always-funny musings on western privilege and social media health fads, respectively.
Opening track and album highlight ‘Man Made Of Meat’ encapsulates Murphy’s contradictions. The punk-funk anthem features extraordinary lyrics that oscillate between hilarious and serious, arch and honest, and even personal and political. References to “your mum’s OnlyFans” are laugh-out-loud funny, but matched by lucid insights into modern-day malaise such as “if it was 1970, I’d have a job in a factory”.
Matching Murphy’s career-best lyrics are some of the rest of the band’s most eclectic compositions. The likes of the spacious ballad ‘Medicine For Horses’, the anthemic electro-rock of ‘Waterboy’ and indescribable jazz-punk of ‘Best In Show Pt.IV’ are evidence of a band as curious and contradictory as Murphy’s lyrics. They’re constantly searching, with similarly admirable zeal, for new ideas, but sometimes revert back to what they know best; manic, bass-lead, post-punk pit-starters in the form of ‘The Bog Body’ and ‘You N33D Me’.
The lush ‘Medicine For Horses’ surmises the very human complexities of ‘viagr aboys’. “Kiss my wife, tell her I love her,” Murphy croons, before confessing that “tell her she was the only thing that made me stop thinking about the plains, the great plains of North America.” Perhaps this is the simple and stupid philosophical truth that Viagra Boys are getting at: love is the only thing that will stop us losing our minds in the face of reality’s horrors.
Details
- Record label: Shrimptech Records
- Release date: April 25, 2025