On why things don't always need to make sense

How did you guys meet? How did you decide to start a band?

Joakim Wei Bernild: I’m not going to get into how we met, but as to how the band started out, I think Anton was the initiator—he’d made some music and called me up, right?

Anton Falck: I had made a demo song and some music guy had heard it, randomly, and wanted to book me for a festival, and I was like, “What the fuck?” And then I felt like I had to make a band. Joakim was a natural choice, because we were both noobs, so we were on the same level, on the same page.

JWB: Even though we only had one or two songs, we were given a 45-minute slot.

AF: We didn’t understand then that we had the power to say that we wouldn’t be able to play for that long.

JWB: We sat down and made 45 minutes’ worth of songs.

AF: Really long songs.

I’m going to assume that “Holiday,” one of your earliest singles, which is fairly standard-length and radio-ready, wasn’t one of them. I love the journey—the sort of “breakup in paradise” plot line—that “Holiday’s” lyrics chart. Its first lines—“Good, skin-kissing summer days/ Sun City, I’m here to stay”—capture the feeling, the boundless optimism, that characterizes the first moments of going on vacation. I still like to listen to it whenever I’m stepping out of an airplane, down one of those staircases on wheels. It’s the perfect score for that moment: the humid air of somewhere tropical hitting you in the face, and you’re all hyped up about how much leisure lies ahead of you.

AF: It’s funny because I’m really not a vacation person. I’ve never traveled to a warm country with palm trees just to relax. I tried doing it for the first time two years ago. I went on a normal holiday because we’d been traveling so much, seeing the world, but always through the lens of being on tour. It is a very different way of traveling. I find that going—just going—on a vacation is really, really weird. I don’t know what to do with myself. It’s not for me. I think that, for me, the song is more of a metaphor, somehow—a state of mind.

I had taken the song’s refrain—“Our love was a holiday”—and the plea that it ends on—“Won’t you just hold me one last time?”—to describe a kind of romance that can’t be fitted into a routine, and can only exist in this exceptional, time-out-of-time space of a vacation.

JWB: We had a few years, three or four years, during which we toured a lot, and that’s when we wrote that song.

AF: When you’re a musician at our level of the industry, the work of touring is its own reward, because you know you’re not going to come home with a ton of money. It was always about trying to have as much fun as possible while away. We knew it was a specific time in our lives that we would look back on at some point, one that wouldn’t last forever. Touring is this weird kind of holiday. You’re away from home, but it’s still work.

You’re both from Denmark. A lot of ink has been spilled on the topic of the outsized success that Scandinavians—and, I think, Swedes in particular—enjoy in the field of popular music. There’s this cultural hypothesis that it’s because they place a great deal of emphasis on music education programs and choral music in early childhood.

AF: It could also have something to do with the way a language is built. When Swedish people talk, they sound like they’re singing. I speak Swedish, and for a long time when we were writing songs, I would sing in Swedish first to come up with the melodies, then translate the lyrics, because we don’t want to release music in Swedish.

JWB: We’ve done something similar with Japanese. We don’t speak Japanese, but we can emulate the way it sounds to come up with melodies.

AF: Languages really change the way you sing. Japanese songs rarely rhyme, but somehow they don’t sound weird. If you were to sing without rhyming in Danish, it would sound really, really strange.

Did you guys see that movie Triangle of Sadness? So much of the dialogue didn’t hit my ear right, and I think that had a lot to do with the fact that Ruben Östlund, the film’s writer and director, was working outside his native language. It struck me that what might figure as a hurdle for someone writing a film in which the characters engage in believable exchanges might actually be ideal for someone writing really moving pop songs, which tend to deal in hyperbole and cliché. To write a pop song in English, you don’t necessarily need to be extremely acquainted with how native speakers actually go about using it in their day-to-day lives. What do you make of your choice to write and record music in English?

AF: We never could have written the same songs in Danish; listening to them would probably make us want to throw up. Then, of course, there’s the practicality of wanting to be understood by as many people as possible, to have an audience outside of little baby Denmark, a country of only six million people. When I write in English, I find myself falling into using the same 500 words that are nearest to me. In English, we can get away with expressing ourselves in a way that is somehow more blunt and honest. I spend a lot of time reading thesauruses, looking words up online, or even taking my lyrics and translating them into Latin or Portuguese, then translating the output into yet another language, back and forth a few times in Google Translate, and then bringing them back into English. Somehow, Google Translate will fuck it up or add some weird extra layer, and sometimes—by doing shit like that—I’ll find the most beautiful words. We proudly use a lot of cheat codes.

There’s this line in your song “Someone New” that goes, “Hey baby, this is goodbye. Like, ‘talk to you never.’” How eye-roll-inducing that would be as a line of dialogue in a film or a novel! Yet it plays so well in the context of a pop song; it really lands.

AF: We’re always trying to position ourselves right on the cusp of irony and a kind of seriousness that can be cringe. It might be hard for people to decipher, but we actually—most of the time—mean everything we say.

JWB: It’s difficult for us to imagine what it would be like to listen to our music as a native English speaker. I often think about that with rap music, where all of these really harsh things are said. If the same things were being said in Danish, I don’t know if I could bear being out in society—to hear that playing in the background, very casually, in the supermarket while I shop.

Speaking of supermarkets, I wanted to ask you guys about money—

AF: How much do you need?

A lot! Last year, you had an installation at the Copenhagen Contemporary, a kind of popup shop called the First Hate Supermarket, stocked with items—such as framed portraits and towels with your faces printed on them—that far surpassed the typical merchandise offering for bands.

AF: I don’t know how this compares internationally, but in Denmark right now, people are really focused on owning the right apartment, the right designer clothes, the right car—maybe a Tesla if they can. Everybody’s having kids and everything has to look perfect. For a while, we were also considering where to take this project, sort of along those lines. Did we want to follow our guts and keep making weird, alternative pop music? Should we record a song in Danish and make it a national hit in Denmark and try to make money off it? We put so much work into the music, but when it comes down to it, with the way the music industry is put together now, with Spotify and streaming, we aren’t really making any money from the music. We want to make a living from what we do, but people only want to buy things. The “Supermarket” was a provocation. We wanted to make money by selling all of this stuff that is external to the music, while also drawing attention to the reality that it’s one of the only ways that we can make a living.

Much of the merchandise was emblazoned with this logo, a sort of amalgamation of various planetary symbols, that appears throughout your imagery as a band. Your song “Fortune Teller” features a play on words in the phrase “pull up,” which means both the action of drawing a Tarot card and, in contemporary slang, of arriving somewhere in style. Is astrology something you believe in? Is magic?

AF: It’s a funny tendency how, in the last few years, everyone in our generation got a deck of Tarot cards or downloaded some kind of astrology app, but these things have definitely always been a theme for us. The First Hate symbol is more than just a logo; it’s also a rune or a sigil. It’s a way of directing a lot of energy into a single symbol—and it doesn’t have to be something that other people understand for it to make sense to us. I mean…maybe if you know, you know.

Your first full-length album was titled A Prayer for the Unemployed. What kinds of jobs have you guys held—or not held?

AF: We’ve always been hustling different jobs. Our friend Dee, who’s from Scotland, found a laminated card in a church where she grew up that said “A Prayer for the Unemployed,” and we thought that was really funny.

When your song “Commercial” was released in the spring of 2022, I and many other barely employed members of our generation’s creative class were, perhaps a little cynically, banking on the belief that investing in cryptocurrencies and other digital assets would be our ticket to long-term financial solvency. I would listen to that song on repeat during the days when it was my job to moderate a group chat for the owners of an NFT—a literal .gif that they had purchased for hundreds of dollars. I was supposed to whip them into a frenzy, insisting that the token’s value was poised to surge, and muting or blocking users for expressing what we called “F.U.D”—which, initially, I thought stood for “fucked-up discourse,” but actually stood for “fear, uncertainty, and doubt.” It was weird, the way that song’s refrains of “Money loves me” and “Pump the prices” were uncanny echoes, almost word for word, of the sorts of sentiments I was being paid to encourage and reward.

JKB: What you were doing there is very much what major labels do with their artists. They take an artist and pump them up and give them loans—money, but also jewelry and fancy cars—and then they push the image that a certain rapper, a certain singer, is so successful, that people come to believe it. And then they are! That’s also like a magic spell, in many ways.

The chorus of your new song “Run Down Love” goes: “Run down love/ Run down my thighs/ Run down love / cruising tonight.” It seems to be about cruising for sex, the chance sexual encounter in a public place. How do things like chance, serendipity, and randomness play into your process of composing and recording songs?

JWB: This feels like a bit of a cliché, but sometimes when we are recording, the first attempt will sound the absolute best, and you can’t replicate it, and you can’t edit it.

AF: When we’re writing lyrics, sometimes a sentence pops out of nowhere, and then we build a whole song around that. All of these small moments of luck are much more valuable than sitting down with the intention of working with a theme, somehow. And yeah, that song is about cruising, which is, as you said, all about luck: you never know who’s hiding in the bush.

How did you land upon your band’s name? Is it an inversion of “first love?” A play on “first date?”

AF: Thank you bandnamemaker.com.

Really? That’s a bit of randomness.

AF: Most of the things we do are very random. Things don’t have to make sense to begin with.

JWB: You can always give them meaning later.