There are few things I appreciate more at NMR than a band whose ambition wildly exceeds any reasonable scale, so naturally I was delighted to see that This Heel have returned with a new EP boldly titled ‘ Rock the World’ , which to me sounds like a 90s charity stadium concert. But who needs the likes of Live Aid, really, when a determined Swede with a basement full of pedals can do the job in nine minutes flat? Freddie Mercury had Wembley; Martin Månsson Sjöstrand has a pract

We find our music in all kinds of strange places: email submissions, online searches, friends at labels — and occasionally from contacts who apparently only ended up at a gig because their girlfriend needed the bathroom. SlightlyCubic is one of those magical bathroom-break discoveries, and ‘ Facades Departure ’ makes the whole chain of events feel entirely worthwhile. It’s an entertaining, unusual and quietly emotional mix of electronic and ‘classic’ instrumentation that’s k

I doubt whether Björn Yttling does too much sitting around watching the Swedish equivalent of ‘ Homes Under the Hammer’ on his weekday mornings. He is, of course, one-third of the (still touring) Peter Bjorn and John , seemingly produces about half of new Nordic pop releases, and has now re-awakened his Yttling Jazz project for the first time in over a decade — we suspect the man’s concept of “a quiet weekend” involves conducting a small orchestra in his kitchen. His latest

We haven’t quite reached the point yet where we’re President of the Universe, but when we are we’ll of course mandate a number of key Nordic Music Review principles — the first of which we’ve been advocating since 2014: that all bands must be easily Googleable, or that some kind of galactic-wide database exists purely for our purposes in finding them. Because trying to find those extra little snippets of info we like to know whilst researching Swedish West Coast band Wild Oce