Stockholm’s Les Big Byrd announce ther new album Diamonds, Rhinestones and Hard Rain due out 1st March 2024 via Chimp Limbs. The news arrives together with “Mareld”, an almost 11 minutes long, mostly instrumental song, based around a shimmering repetitive synth riff, droney fuzz guitar and trippy vocal harmonies.
“The best thing about releasing music on my own record label is that there was nobody to try and convince me that a 11 minute synth jam isn’t single material” says Chimp Limbs director of the board, Jocke Åhlund. “The title “Mareld” is the Swedish word for the strange bioluminescence phenomenon, a kind of bacteria that lights up the night time ocean’s surface in a ghostly fashion, and we wrote this one equally as much for dancing as for meditation.”
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Diamonds, Rhinestones and Hard Rain is the fourth album from Les Big Byrd, the band consisting of Jocke Åhlund, Frans Johansson, Christian Olsson and Nino Keller. The new album features lyrics and song titles in both Swedish and English, but the most crucial language is its musical one, created by Åhlund and Johansson when they formed the band in 2011 and nurtured lovingly since, especially since the former took back control of the production side of things on 2022’s Eternal Light Brigade.
Quite where the title of this album came from remains mysterious even to the band’s frontman, Jocke Åhlund. You might speculate, though, that it’s a neat encapsulation of a record that is unafraid to deal in contradictions, that finds room both for glittering pop and for stormy atmosphere, and that doesn’t just showcase the thrillingly ambitious psych-rock sound that we’ve come to expect from the group by now; it pushes it forward, into new and more daring territory. After their third album, Eternal Light Brigade, took four years to follow on from 2018’s mission statement Iran Iraq IKEA, Åhlund was determined that this time, the band would hit the ground running, swiftly returning to the studio for another album that maintains the momentum and energy of Eternal Light Brigade whilst finding room to wander down sonic avenues all its own.
“I wanted to stay inside that bubble of creativity,” explains Åhlund, a legendary figure in the Swedish capital’s rock scene who’s also played in Caesars, Smile and Teddybears and has collaborated with everybody from Chrissie Hynde, Giorgio Moroder to Sonic Boom and Anton Newcombe. “I wanted to maintain a mood from start to finish.”
The addition of new keyboardist, Christian Olsson ,has been a boon for intra-band relations, says Åhlund, especially as he had huge shoes to fill after the departure of his predecessor, Martin ‘Konie’ Ehrencrona. “Finding somebody new wasn’t just about finding a great musician,” he says. “It’s about finding somebody with the right personality, somebody who you can stay in a crummy hotel room with or ride around with in a van, and have a great time with. This lineup feels really good.”
The band headed back to Visby’s Sandkvie Studio to cut tracks for Diamonds, Rhinestones and Hard Rain. With Åhlund bringing in the basis for the songs and the rest of the band helping to shape and flesh them out, musical trends began to appear, ones that would come to define the most varied record of the group’s career. Those in thrall to the spacier and more expansive side of the band’s output to date will find that itch scratched by epic psych slow-burners like ten-minute opener ‘Mareld’ and the monumental, Spiritualized-esque instrumental ‘Lycka Till På Färden’.
But there is space, as well, for the other side of Les Big Byrd, the one driven by hooks and melody, alive in songs like the title track and ’Curved Light’, which take the sixties psych-rock tradition and tighten the screws on it, making it sharper, leaner, catcher. Underpinning everything, meanwhile, is a thick sense of atmosphere, a beguiling, evocative mood that suggests that Åhlund has been successful in his quest to keep up a certain feeling throughout the record.
“Of course everything that influences us pours into a kind of pool to draw inspiration from,” Åhlund explains. “But hopefully, what comes out of it is something that’s unique to us. So many bands around seem hung up on staying in one lane – like just being “psychedelic”, or whatever that’s just formulaic, and not that’s not at all interesting to me. We are trying to create something personal that means something to us. And I hope we’ve achieved it.”
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