On the surface, Viagra Boys have very little in common with label mate Yung Lean. They’re both from Stockholm, given, and if you squinted hard enough you might mistake the extremely online rapper for lead singer Sebastian Murphy. But press play on Street Worms, the six piece’s debut album, and any similarity flies straight out the fönster. Within seconds you’re slapped with a dense slab of gritty, driving post-punk that lands itself somewhere between Protomartyr, the B-52s, and Årabrot’s more percussive outings. A million miles, then, from Yung Lean’s slow, auto-tuned, sad boy rap.
But there’s something uncanny that connects the disparate artists; something essential to any good freak. It’s at the heart of Ween, Zappa, Danny Brown, and countless other musical weirdos throughout history — the straddling of a line between total absurdist irreverence and a sincere expression of fear and pain. Where Yung Lean nests suicidal ideations in a song about Gatorade, Viagra Boys can list sports in a song and album that’s terrified of inevitable entropic collapse.
Album opener ‘Down in the Basement’ kicks off with a steady groove that’s maintained for most of the record by a disciplined and energetic rhythm section, soon punctuated by Murphy’s sneering, breathless vocals and the first taste of a saxophone’s skronk that pushes impatiently through the busy mix. Murphy sings like a child running down a steep hill, leaning forward, arms flailing, certain that if he stops he might fall. He yelps about a married man who’s “up to something, man.” Dressed in latex in a barren basement, he’s caught by his wife. “How are you gonna explain that?” he asks us. Though not always as explicit, this theme of chaotic ugliness lying under an ordered veneer is one that runs through the album.
Lead single ‘Sports’ follows shortly after, plodding in with similar percussion, this time bolstered by some clicks and claps and a sun-drenched, swaggering base line. Lyrically, the song presents an ostensible list of sports that becomes quickly watered down with, um, not-sports: “Baseball, basketball, Weiner dog, short shorts, cigarettes.” The chorus repeats the word “sports”, at first with a cool nonchalance, and then with a growing urgency. The lyrics present a nostalgic, Day-Glo palette of active scenery, like a brochure for a summer camp, the glaring pictures of volleyball players and water-skiers promising something more illicit — “getting high with your friends” — and the screaming insistence of the chorus hiding the sad, mundane reality — “getting high in the morning, buying things off the internet.”
After a brief interlude titled ‘Best in Show’ — a spoken word announcement of a dystopian dog show, delivered in a southern drawl over a caustic tannoy — we’re treated to the emotional centrepiece of the album, ‘Just Like You’. It cools the atmosphere with dark-wave synths, mechanical drumming, and as close to calm, intimate vocals as you’re going to find here. Separated by melancholic instrumental passages, the track’s two halves sing to each other, both relieved they didn’t end up in their counterpart’s place. The first takes the form of a Thank You Speech, grateful for some unclear success. “All I got, I got from the help of this wonderful society,” he sings. He’s afraid, though, of the closeness of failure, of addiction, of mental illness. But then he wakes from the dream, and his fears are confirmed. His voice falters as he laments the “completely fucked up society” that’s kept him from succeeding. Eventually he tires, his voice replaced in the stark soundscape by searching saxophone tones.
Before a final instrumental track, Street Worms ends with the semi-eponymous ‘Worms,’ a thematic answer to the question raised earlier in the album — can a day to day mundanity be maintained in the face of the dark, subversive forces that live in us all?
No.
With tired blues-rock licks, the track leads us out with the insistence that “the same worms that eat me will someday eat you too.” A nod to death and decay, of course, but we’re not talking about regular worms here; these are street worms. This is the death and decay of whatever face you give the world — be it involvement in competition, business, normal relationships, normal society — to hide the unrestrained, ugly, indulgent, and most of all fun truth beneath. It’s mournful if you let yourself get attached, but otherwise it’s a freeing, joyous celebration.
Viagra Boys are not attached.
