Kate Boy: "Northern Lights" on SoundCloud.
Even after hearing Kate Boy's neon-streaked 2012 singles "Northern Lights" and "In Your Eyes"-- all white-heat hooks and warping plastic production-- and taking a look at their shadowy cover art, it wasn't really clear who "Kate Boy" was-- a singer? A producer? A band? The answer's a little complicated.
"We basically do everything together," Hampus Nordgren Hemlin says of his three bandmates, Kate Akhurst, Markus Dextegen, and Oskar Sikow Engström. "We all write and produce everything together, and play each other's instruments as well." So when it came time to name the still-untitled band they formed last year in Stockholm, Sweden, they decided to create "Kate Boy" as a fictional fifth member that reflects their egalitarian songwriting process. (They consider it "this androgynous person, almost like a character," Akhurst explains.) If it sounds confusing, the video for "Northern Lights" offers a sleek visual metaphor: all of their silhouettes continuously blending and morphing into a single, slightly eerie composite face.
Taken apart, the members of Kate Boy are a geographical hodgepodge-- vocalist Akhurst is originally from Australia, while the rest of the band members are Swedish. And musically, they're interested in updating the classic 70s/80s sounds of Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush with what today's technology has to offer. Following their recent Northern Lights EP (which also features an excellent, slow-mo remix of the title track by fellow Swede Taken by Trees), Kate Boy have spent time prepping some more material and planning the visual component of their live show, which they hope to bring Stateside later this year. "Everything we touch turns to gold," sings Akhurst on "Northern Lights"-- a hell of a declaration to make on a debut single. But as Kate Boy look forward, they're hoping to make good on that promise.
Pitchfork: Kate, what brought you from Australia to Sweden?
Kate Akhurst: I've always loved the music that came from Sweden. I started out as a songwriter in Australia and got my first publishing deal there when I was 16. Then, at 21, I moved to L.A. for five years before coming [to Stockholm] for the first time in October 2011. I met the guys the last two days I was here. Someone from [another recording session] was like, "You should meet these boys, I think you're really going to like them." So we met up for a drink, and then decided to go straight down into the studio and start working that very first night. We had this instantaneous connection; we couldn't even wait until the next day. I felt like I found my people, like, "I've been waiting all my life for you! I can't wait another minute." We actually wrote "Northern Lights" on that first night we met. After that visit, I wanted to come back straight away. So I went back home and got a visa for the UK and Sweden and now I've been here the past year.
Hampus Nordgren Hemlin: "Northern Lights" came as a bit of a surprise-- it wasn't anything I thought we had in us. It just came through us, and then we liked it, and we've been developing it since. It's been a learning process to be able to recreate what we did.
Pitchfork: What do you think it is about Sweden that makes it such a pop mecca?
KA: L.A. is really, really pop too, but the thing I love about Sweden the most is how they do pop music with a twist and an edge to it. I haven't really heard that in other places. A lot of the times, everyone's chasing each other's tails and trying to do the hottest sound.
HNH: Sweden is a pretty small country compared to others in the music business, and everybody sort of knows everyone, so it's easy to collaborate. And since we have seven months of darkness and winter, you've got to be creative. In other countries, you go out with your surfboard and chill on the beach, but we have to do something else-- there's no beach to go to.
Kate Boy: "Northern Lights" (Houses Remix) on SoundCloud.
Pitchfork: You produced "Northern Lights" and "In Your Eyes" yourselves. As you move ahead, is it important to you to retain that DIY approach?
KA: Our vision is so clear that it doesn't matter who we bring on board, or whether we're left on our own. We can execute it ourselves, luckily, but we do want to expand.
Markus Dextegen: Instead of going around, talking to people, and getting money to do it, we just made it ourselves. It may have taken longer than it would have doing it the other way, but at least it became what we wanted and not what somebody else wants.