Viagra Boys started, as the story goes, with a karaoke rendition of Mariah Carey's 'We Belong Together' — frontman Sebastian Murphy and bassist Henrik Höckert ended up at the same birthday party after a night out, and whatever happened at that karaoke machine turned into a Stockholm post-punk band within a few years. Murphy himself is an odd fit for a Swedish band on paper: born in San Rafael, California, he moved to Sweden at 17 to live with his aunt and worked as a tattoo artist before any of this started.
Street Worms, their 2018 debut, won the IMPALA European Independent Album of the Year award for its raw energy and black humor, and Welfare Jazz and Caveman have kept the band's fixations — drugs, anger, the specific ugliness of male privilege — front and center, delivered over discordant sax and guitar that sound genuinely dangerous rather than performatively edgy.