Uncanny chroniclers of life’s underbelly, Viagra Boys have also spent the last few years working on themselves. As ‘viagr aboys’ fine-tunes their surreal pen within a world gone mad, maybe the Swedes’ brand of weird is about the sanest thing left.
Words: Lisa Wright
Photos: Fredrik Bengtsson
17th April 2025
A few months ago, Sebastian Murphy heard a song on the radio that moved him to tears. Supping a midday Guinness in a back-alley Manchester pub, many, many hours before their late night DJ set as part of the city’s BBC 6 Music Festival, the heavily tattooed Viagra Boys frontman tries to remember its name: “That’s me in the corner… That’s me in the spotlight…”
One of modern music’s few cohorts of genuine oddballs, the Swedish sextet’s anarchic reputation might not tally with a misty-eyed sing-along to R.E.M, however the communion was no fluke. “I listened to ‘Losing My Religion’ every day for a couple of weeks and every time it would bring a tear to my eye. I don’t know why, but it gets me every time,” Murphy says, shaking his head, the word ‘Lös’ - Swedish for ‘loose’ - permanently inked onto his brow. “Really good music makes me cry. I’ve heard that song a million times but, for some reason, when I heard it then, I was like, ‘That’s a good song’.” “That’s when you know you’re getting older,” cuts in bassist Henry Höckert. “When you’re like, ‘R.E.M - that’s a really good song…’”
When Viagra Boys first erupted into public consciousness back in 2018 with the sardonic, ludicrous listing exercise of ‘Sports’ (“Volleyball / Beach ball / Surfboard / Baseballs…”), they seemed like a band for whom the regular laws of time might not apply. In the seven years and three studio albums - 2018 debut ‘Street Worms’, 2021’s ‘Welfare Jazz’, and the following year’s ‘Cave World’ - since, the group have skulked their way further into singular terrain. Channelling a lineage of wild outliers that stretches back to spiritual godfathers Iggy Pop and The Stooges, Viagra Boys’ version of refinement wasn’t ever about becoming more mature, rather becoming more themselves: their howling stories of cavemen and conspiracy theorists getting sharper and stranger as they rooted their band in a lane of one.
Last time that DIY convened with Murphy, he was neck-deep in an existential hangover in the midst of a hefty festival run, waxing lyrical about nihilism and a “total hate for the world”. On this month’s sort-of-self-titled ‘viagr aboys’, he has made - “probably” - his first record from an almost positive, good mental place. Couple this with their newfound appreciation for Michael Stipe and are the uncontainable Swedes, whisper it, mellowing out? “I’ve been mellowing out for a few years now. I feel like I know who I am, and I know what I want - and I’m gonna get it!” he says, voice piss-takingly rising on the final phrase like an American politician. “No, I’m just kidding…
“That part of me will never die, but I’m a bit more realistic now. I know that there’s a lot of stuff I can’t really handle anymore. I’m turning into a geezer,” he chuckles. “I feel like a middle-aged man, in a sense. I’m 35 and I don’t really feel young anymore, and I think it’s probably good for me that I don’t feel young anymore. I play squash once a week; I try to get to the gym for my mental health, so I can not be an arsehole to everyone around me and myself. But I still love freaky things. I’ll always be a freak.” “That’s the thing,” nods Höckert. “You’re always gonna be who you are. Even if you don’t drink, or you’re not taking speed every day, you’re always gonna be a weirdo.”
“ “I see myself as entertainment for the resistance.” — Sebastian Murphy
One listen to recent single ‘The Bog Body’ - a gloriously surreal dissection of “jealousy in general”, written through the insane prism of a public sharpening their claws towards a recently dug-up, pickled woman - and it’s clear that Viagra Boys are, indeed, still weirdos. “You say you hate the swamp woman / What the hell are you on about? / Do you even know the difference between a swamp and an ancient bog?!” rails Murphy over chugging bass lines and flying saxophones. An avid consumer of the more baffling ends of pop culture, the frontman is a big fan of an internet wormhole. “I’ll study some bullshit for ages,” he sighs. “I was obsessed with this voyage called the Northwest Passage, where they sailed from Britain and tried to get around America. I’ll think about that for a year. Actually I should write a song about that voyage, there was a lot of cannibalism going on…”
Nestled firmly in his crosshairs on ‘viagr aboys’ are a certain breed of modern pseudo-spirituals. On ‘Pyramid Of Health’, they’re telling him to drink tree sludge and “eat cactuses for breakfast”; on the shamanic ‘Best In Show Pt. IV’ he inhabits the role: “I was gutted like a fish and stabbed by a shadow man from an ayahuasca cult.” Even mention the words ‘new-age’ in conversation to Murphy, and something inside of him flips.
“It’s these people who were probably more liberal back in the day, but they’ve gotten so paranoid and conspiracy-filled that they’re probably on the far right spectrum now because of their hate or distrust of the government,” he declaims. “I find it infuriating, the bullshit that people use to justify [those views]. I can’t stand people that have a shit-load of problems that they think will be cured by rubbing on some fucking crystal or drinking turmeric, and then they think they’re better than everyone else or that they’ve found some universal truth. They don’t know the truth about anything ‘cos all they’ve done is Google something once and find an article written by some bum-fuck idiot and then they’ll base their whole life on lies.”
There is, we suggest, a slight ‘red pill/ blue pill’ feeling to a lot of particularly online life right now. “Take the green pill - think for yourself!” Murphy cries before checking himself: “Actually, I hate saying ‘think for yourself’ because that’s what these people say. ‘Do your own research’. No, you know what, DON’T do your own research. Let the researchers do the research and then you can sit home and jack off or whatever…”
“ “I’m 35 and I don’t really feel young anymore, and I think it’s probably good for me that I don’t feel young anymore.” — Sebastian Murphy
Following ‘Cave World’’s overtly outward-looking gaze, Murphy has stated that, on their newest, he wanted to veer back into his inside world. “That album was much more current event-based, and I didn’t want to get stuck in that mindset,” he nods. “I went back to how I used to write songs, which was based on little funny stories or things about myself that I explore - themes of self loathing and death…” In amongst the self-laceration, meanwhile, are a pair of love songs: well, one love song, and one song about wanting to smash yourself and your partner into a wall together.
Intimate closer ‘River King’, however, is undeniably, unashamedly romantic. “Looking at you, everything feels easy now,” Murphy croons - a world away from the ‘Man Made of Meat’ that begins the record. “[I was feeling] sentimental. We’re coming to the end times so it’s time to love your neighbour - even if you do rub crystals on your balls,” he laughs. “That [other] character is always part of me. It’s who I’ve been since I was a teenager. It’s hard wired into my brain and I love that side of me because it’s what’s made me able to write songs. I feel no shame for who I am, but I definitely want to explore other sides of myself.”
Though, on the outside, Viagra Boys can read as the type of underbelly-dwellers that your nan would cross the road to avoid, there’s always been this evident sense of both intelligence and nuance to their madness that’s raised them above the level of just a party band. They might play hard (or, at least, they certainly used to), but they also work hard. “I think we’ve always been ambitious,” says Murphy. “You can’t really depend on funny ideas you get when you’re high, you have to force yourself to be productive. We’ve been in the studio every week for months on end, and even if some days you make five minutes of music or change one line in a song or switch out a guitar riff, even if you work on it a little bit every day it’s impactful to the whole album.” Do people get the wrong idea of them as just a bunch of miscreants? “Maybe people do think that, and if they do then go ahead because it’s not true,” the frontman shrugs. “It takes a lot of hard work and dedication to put out something that you’re proud of.”
This progressive attitude permeates their whole worldview. Back in 2023, the band toured across the US supporting Queens of the Stone Age - a band they cheerfully label “just older versions of us”. Taking in a lot of the American South, Viagra Boys found themselves playing in amphitheatres and arenas full of people who were not necessarily their people. “There were a lot of average blokes [in those crowds] and I liked that,” Murphy says. “I think that’s when you’re doing good work. If someone whose views aren’t the same as yours gets into your stuff, who knows? It might be an influence on them, and I’d rather be an influence on them than hate them.
“We’re gonna go on tour in America [in the autumn] and that totally sucks because it’s turning into WWII Germany over there. They’re deporting people and denying them their rights and, in a sense, you should boycott it,” he continues. “But there’s a resistance as well and I see myself as entertainment for the resistance. It’s a protest, in a way. Even though our songs aren’t explicitly protest music, I think all music in a sense is a protest if you know what the people who are doing it are all about.”
“ “I can’t stand people that have a shit-load of problems that they think will be cured by rubbing on some fucking crystal.” — Sebastian Murphy
Though ‘viagr aboys’, with its references to LL Bean and songs written from the point of view of a dog (‘Uno II’), might not be trying to rub shoulders with Billy Bragg or any of music’s overt political commentators, there is undeniably still a sense of anger, unease and distrust that stems from the horrors of the world right now. The record could, Murphy says, have ended up even further down that road. “I’ve never been so politically upset as I am now, so maybe things would have been different if I wrote this album a few months ago,” he muses. But, when you’re a firmly liberal punk band writing about existing in the world in 2025, “everything is political”.
Conversation turns to recent Netflix talking point Adolescence: as a band who’ve regularly written about the insidious and scary sides of our current culture, the show’s conversations around online radicalisation are particularly pertinent to their interests. “Everything’s so extreme these days, so if kids fall into the wrong wormhole, they’re gonna grow up very angry,” Murphy nods. “I’m glad when I was a kid I ended up angry at the right things, because part of being a kid is being angry - at least for me it was - and you’re gonna find something to be angry at. But hopefully we’re the culture on the other side of the spectrum than Hustlers University or whatever the fuck it all is…”
There is a sense, when an artist puts out a self-titled record a significant way into their career, that it represents some sort of core distillation of themself. Viagra Boys mostly agree. “We’ve been a band for 10 years now and I feel like it’s an epitome of what we’ve been doing. It feels like essential Viagra Boys in a way,” Murphy says. But maybe the real takeaway of the band’s fourth record - and, in fact, of their entire decade so far - is exactly what that core amounts to. Yes, the band are always going to be, in their own words, “sexy weird”. Shuffling across the stage in his sunglasses to Devo during the band’s DJ set later that night, Murphy’s particular brand of charisma is as strange as it is magnetic. He will never, as he knows, be a regular bloke.
But alongside their famously grotty, brilliant live shows - shows that will, next month, see them play their biggest UK headlines to date including a crowning gig at London’s Brixton Academy. Alongside the niche, surreal songs that have, against all odds, made them a bigger streaming concern than IDLES, Amyl and the Sniffers and almost all of their peers. Alongside the fact that they’re a band whose mere name sends mentions of them to spam folders across the land, Viagra Boys really do care about their art and the society they’re releasing it into.
Where, back in their infancy - and even not so long ago - Sebastian Murphy was fuelled by nihilism and wanting to fuck the world, now what gets his juices going is a little different. “Communism! Equal rights!” he yells. “No, I don’t know, we just want to take care of each other and take care of the band and nurture it. We want to make music we’ve always wanted to make - some boomer-ass music. We want to make some boomer hits!”
‘viagr aboys’ is out 25th April via Shrimptech Enterprises.
Tags: Features, In Deep,
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