By Anna Zhila, art and music critic
The Beautiful Sickness of Viagra Boys
There is a particular kind of energy that radiates from the music of Viagra Boys. It is the sound of a fever dream, of a bar fight breaking out in a philosophy department. It is the squall of a saxophone colliding with a relentless, driving bassline, all of it held together by the raw, almost painful, honesty of Sebastian Murphy’s bark. It is a glorious, intelligent, and deeply funny mess. And in our current moment, it feels like the most sane response to an insane world.
The Swedish post-punk outfit has, over the course of three albums, perfected a unique and vital form of cultural commentary. They are not preachers or politicians. They are trickster gods, holding up a cracked mirror to the anxieties of the modern age and forcing us to laugh at the grotesque reflection. Their latest album, Cave World, is their most potent sermon yet. It is a journey into the heart of our post-truth era, a compassionate diagnosis of the sickness that has us all in its grip. To listen to Viagra Boys is to understand that sometimes, the only way to deal with the absurdity of the world is to become even more absurd.
The Joke That Tells the Truth
It all begins with the name. Viagra Boys. It is a perfect, self-deprecating joke, a dismissal of the very notion of rock-and-roll virility before a single note has been played. It speaks of impotence, of performance anxiety, of the fragile, chemical-dependent nature of modern masculinity. This is the band’s foundational satire. They are not celebrating the power of being a “real man”; they are mocking the pathetic, insecure performance of it.
This same satirical lens is now turned outwards, onto the wider world. Cave World is a direct confrontation with the slurry of conspiracies, alternative truths, and ideological bubbles that define our time. When Murphy screams about vaccine microchips and other paranoid fantasies on a track like “Creepy Crawlers,” he is not simply making fun of the people who believe these things. It is something more complex, more interesting than that. He is embodying the panic. He is channelling the fear and confusion of an age where objective reality has become a matter of opinion.
The band understands a crucial truth that so many other commentators miss. The people who fall down these rabbit holes are not always monsters. They are often just people, alienated and anxious, searching for a story that makes sense of a world that has stopped making sense. The band’s saxophonist, Oskar Carls, has spoken of having people in his own life who are drawn to these ideas, of the difficulty of engaging with them directly. The music, then, becomes a different kind of conversation. It is an act of compassionate satire. The humour is not a weapon to be used against the believers; it is a shield to be used against the despair of the situation itself. It is a way to talk about the darkness without being consumed by it.
The Architecture of Chaos
To understand how Viagra Boys achieve this, you have to understand their process. Their music is not born from intricate songwriting. It is born from the groove. A song begins with a riff, a bassline that has to be compelling enough to be played for fifty minutes without getting boring. The album, in this sense, is just an advertisement for the live show. The real art happens in the room, in the visceral, unpredictable energy of the performance.
This is where the band’s eclectic background becomes so crucial. They are a collection of individuals with different musical roots, all bringing something unique to the table. Carls himself comes from a background in free jazz and improvised music. He speaks of the challenge of learning how to play the saxophone not as a lead, solo instrument, but as part of the rhythm section, a textural element that adds to the chaos rather than floating above it. This is why his searing, squealing sax lines feel so integral to their sound. They are not decoration; they are part of the engine.
The loss of their founding guitarist, Benjamin Vallé, before this album was a profound blow. Carls describes him as having a “superpower,” the ability to play the most minimalist, almost “stupid,” riffs and make them sound monumental. His absence forced the band to evolve, to find new ways to fill the huge creative space he left behind. The result, on Cave World, is their tightest, most focused work yet, a condensation of their chaotic energy into a leaner, more powerful form.
The Mask of the Trickster
Perhaps the most telling detail about the band is the simplest. The sunglasses. They are almost always wearing sunglasses. Why? Because, as Carls admits, they are all “kind of shy guys.” It is a way to “look cool, without having to do too much.”
This small, human detail is the key to their entire artistic project. The aggressive, confrontational, and often grotesque stage persona is a mask. It is a character. They are shy men who get on stage and perform a kind of beautiful sickness. They adopt the mask of the degenerate, the conspiracy theorist, the failed masculine ideal, in order to show us the absurdity of these roles. It is a performance of immense control and intelligence, disguised as pure, unhinged chaos.
They are not interested in whether people “get” the joke. The work is not for a specific, enlightened audience. It is a primal scream into the void, a shared, cathartic release for anyone who feels the creeping madness of the modern world. And in that shared release, there is a strange kind of hope.
The final, tongue-in-cheek conclusion of Cave World is that we should abandon this failed experiment of civilisation and return to the trees, to live as monkeys. It is a joke, of course. But like all of Viagra Boys’ jokes, it contains a hard kernel of truth. It is an acknowledgement that our big, clever brains have led us to a place of profound and dangerous absurdity. The music of Viagra Boys does not offer a way out. It does not offer a solution. It offers something far more valuable. It offers a perfect soundtrack for the decline. And it invites us to dance, and to laugh, as we go down.
