“You have rappers making a punk album. It takes more than that to impress me!”: The Hives frontman calls modern punk “pretty sanitised”
On the cover of their latest record, The Hives Forever Forever the Hives, the Swedish unit are depicted wearing crowns and robes. It’s most likely due to The Hives being garage punk royalty – and one of the few punk bands continuing to carry the torch of proper punk aggro.
In a new interview with The iPaper, frontman Pelle Almqvist argues that modern punk has lost its edge. “A lot of punk is pretty sanitised these days,” he frowns. “I guess Californian punk did that. You have rappers saying they’re making a punk album. It takes more than that to impress me!”
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While Almqvist doesn’t namedrop any artists, the phenomenon of rapper-turned-punk rocker is widespread. Machine Gun Kelly (mgk) is one of the biggest names to do so, his 2020 record Ticket To My Downfall notably marking his shift to from hip-hop to pop punk. But there’s also acts like Denzel Curry and Rico Nasty that are melding punk and rap with gusto.
The issue of punk feeling “sanitised” isn’t solely rooted in the sound, however. With more “likeable” punk acts surfacing, it has had an impact on the image of punk overall. In Almqvist’s mind, the watered down punk acts have transformed the genre into something more palatable rather than a parent’s worst nightmare.
If the Hives frontman had it his way, he’d almost prefer for less people to enjoy his music. “My view is maybe I think our music is more extreme than it actually is, because I meet people in the supermarket all the time and they’re like, ‘You guys are the best!’ – I respond like, ‘Oh, you like it?’” he disappointedly admits. “I didn’t know it would be that likeable. Apparently, it is.”
“I was a born contrarian,” Almqvist proudly states, discussing his band’s latest album. “Which was exhausting until we formed the band and I found a place to put all that stuff. Maybe there’s some vague evolutionary advantage to that, but it came at a pretty heavy price.”
In his latest chat with Guitar.com, the frontman asserts that Bad Call is his favourite cut from the latest record. “There are a lot of great riffs on [the new record] – Hooray Hooray Hooray has a great riff, Paint a Picture has a great riff, but I think my favourite is the verse to Bad Call,” he explains. “It’s the drums that are the star in that one, the chords accent the drums and then travel through the song. If it was just the drums, maybe you’d get a bit bored on your journey towards the chorus.”
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