Swedish indie band The Radio Dept. takes independent music to an extreme.
For one, The Radio Dept. has always recorded its tracks entirely within the houses of guitarist and vocalist Johan Duncanson, guitarist Martin Carlberg and keyboardist Daniel Tjäder, never utilizing a studio. The band also does everything itself, from production to album covers to T-shirts.
Duncanson, speaking during a dinner at Tjäder’s apartment in Stockholm, described the process of recording, which currently happens in his apartment.
“Right now it’s kind of in between rooms… It’s a hallway,” he said. “So it’s got kind of an echo, which I’ve heard is bad for music recording, but we don’t mind. It’s just a basic, extremely cheap PC, and we have this old guitar amp that we put everything through.”
The band, which will come to the Rock N Roll Hotel tomorrow, has a painfully Do It Yourself approach to recording that is at odds with its international fame; recently, The Radio Dept. was confirmed to be in the lineup of Coachella, a massive music festival in April in California.
Another distinguishing facet of The Radio Dept. is its humility in its careful and slow ascent to recognition. The band, named after a combination gas station and radio repair shop, fully formed in 2001 and took some time to stumble into the indie limelight.
“We don’t think we’ve compromised anywhere, and we do everything ourselves, so it’s fine to be appreciated for that,” Carlberg said on whether the band regrets this slow-and-steady approach. “So I wouldn’t change anything, really. Maybe to release more. Not to be so lazy, I think. But I mean, other than that, I’m fine.”
Added Duncanson: “I think we would be doing this even if it were just putting out cassettes to give to friends. It’s always been about the music and not about, you know, having a career or anything like that to us. It sounds pretentious, but … actually, we’re not in it for the fame. We just started out wanting to release our own 7″ single back in 2002, and the plan was to keep doing that forever, or until someone wanted to help us with all the bureaucracy that comes with putting out records.”
The band has come a long way. It made Pitchfork’s Top 100 Tracks of 2010 and has been nominated, along with such greats as jónsi and Robyn, for this year’s first-ever Nordic Music Prize.
The band’s show at the Rock N Roll Hotel will mark the first date of its American tour. The tour follows the release of Passive Aggressive: Singles 2002-2010, a double-disc compilation that includes singles, remixes and B-sides.
“We’ve never done a proper tour anywhere, I think,” Carlberg said. “So it’s going to be rough, I think, for us, because we’ve never been this long on tour. But we look forward to it.”
The Radio Dept. specializes in dreamy, shoegaze-y pop. It has recently been recognized in the blog world for 2010’s Clinging to a Scheme, the band’s third album — which only has 10 songs — that includes the fantastically poppy “Heaven’s On Fire.”
In 10 years the band has only released three studio albums. How would Duncanson explain the band’s rationale for preferring brevity in music?
“In Swedish there’s a saying that means ‘wonderful is short’,” he said. “Andy Warhol used to say ‘always leave them wanting less.’ Which is really funny. But I think we do the opposite. Like we make everything really short and then people tell us it’s too short, but hopefully they want to have another listen, then.”
The Radio Dept. is playing at the Rock N Roll Hotel tomorrow along with The Young Prisms. Doors open at 8 p.m., and tickets cost $14.
wildman@umdbk.com
