The Hives wanted their new album to be “fucking stupid and childish”
The Hives have spoken about their upcoming new album ‘The Death Of Randy Fitzsimmons’ in a new interview with NME, sharing their intentions behind the record.
The album arrives 11 years after the Swedish band’s previous release, ‘Lex Hives’, with the character in the title referring to their mysterious founder, mentor and songwriter. It will be released on August 11.
Speaking to NME, singer Pelle Almqvist and guitarist Nicholaus Arson discussed returning to the studio after more than a decade. “You want to come back with a bang, you don’t want to come back with ‘adult rock’,” Arson said of the high-energy approach the band took on the new record.
“Imagine ‘The Hives have been away from 10 years and now they’ve matured’,” Almqvist explained. “It was important to go the opposite way. This has to be fucking stupid and childish, even worse than we’ve been before! The punk songs on this album are almost worse than our first record. ‘The Bomb’ and ‘Trapdoor Solution’ are almost like us reaching the ceiling of it.”
“Whenever we play these songs, I feel like we’re industry leaders in the field,” Arson added. “Fast-paced, energetic, rock’n’roll and punk. It’s a good feeling, and from having been away for so long, it was what we ended up doing from sheer excitement.”
The pair also revealed that an unusual instrument had helped shape ‘The Death Of Randy Fitzsimmons’. “We bought this thing out of The Yellow Pages, which was a prototype this guy made of an organ connected to a guitar connected to a vocal mic,” Almqvist said. “It was a one-man band contraption and fucking ridiculous.”
“Whenever we wrote something on that and it sounded cool, we thought it sounded like a pop-py version of the band Suicide,” Arson continued. “Whether it’s The Stooges, Kraftwerk or early hip-hop, what it has in common is a beat and someone singing over the top of it for two or three minutes.”
After drawing a huge crowd at this year’s Glastonbury and supporting Arctic Monkeys on their recent stadium tour, The Hives have confirmed their own headline UK and Ireland dates for 2024.
The Swedish band will return to the road next March, kicking off in Leeds and travelling through a further 10 cities before wrapping up in London in April. You can find any remaining tickets here.
The post The Hives wanted their new album to be “fucking stupid and childish” appeared first on NME.
Rhian Daly
NME
