The Swedish collective Slutavverkning has built a career on disruption: noise not as ornament, but as principle. With Skräp (“Garbage”), their latest EP, they have distilled this unruly ethos into four tracks that play like dispatches from a factory floor suddenly overtaken by free jazz and political theatre. The effect is brash, combustible, and above all…alive.
Formed in 2018, Slutavverkning began as a trio: Pelle Andersson on guitar, Jon Ekström on vocals, and Marcus Källström on drums. They were soon joined by saxophonist Per Texas Johansson, a luminary from the Fire! Orchestra, who lent an edge of chaos to the group’s proletarian experiments. The band’s earlier cycle of EPs, Music of Labour and Sorrow I–III, showed both ambition and irreverence. Then came bassist Per Wiberg, a veteran of Opeth and Candlemass, and reed player Isak Hedtjärn, whose clarinet lines dart like sudden intrusions of memory. Together, they pushed the sound further outward, a collision of industrial clangor and improvisational freedom, reaching its stride with last year’s Levande Charader.
Skräp takes that energy and compresses it into a tighter, more volatile container. “We wanted to take all the forbidden sounds and production techniques, and squeeze it all into a pair of pants that’s too tight,” the band declares. “Push everything a bit too far, right up to the breaking point!” The result feels exactly like that: claustrophobic, gleeful, untidy in ways that feel precise. Andersson’s guitar gashes through the mix, while Hedtjärn’s reeds squeal like an alarm system wired incorrectly on purpose. Källström drums as though each strike might set the room ablaze.
There are echoes of Nick Cave’s Birthday Party in its reckless yowl, Fugazi’s discipline warped into mania, the skittering unpredictability of No Wave. Yet what dominates is the band’s own sense of urgency, a conviction that sound can still startle. These songs circle around the garbage we inherit and produce: what we consume, what we discard, what is unable to vanish. The lyrics suggest bitterness and comedy intertwined, while the instrumentation makes those ideas physical, rattling the listener until they seem less metaphor than matter.
The black-and-white video, directed by the band with Richard Lukacs, underscores the point. Studio performance spliced with stop motion destruction, trash, burial: music and refuse collapsing into each other, one indistinguishable from the other.
Slutavverkning might be abrasive, but within the noise is a kind of pleasure: joy in transgression, joy in collision. Skräp sounds like a tightrope walked above a scrapyard, swaying with danger but buoyed by laughter. It is music of provocation, of garbage reassembled into gold leaf, of disorder pressed into something resembling grace.
Watch below:
Slutavverkning’s Skräp EP is out now! Order here
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