The Sounds have outlasted the new-wave revival of the early aughts, gliding along on their shimmery electro-pop for more than a decade. With singer Maja Ivarsson leading the band’s synth-driven, dance-friendly charge, the Swedish quintet has been touring throughout most of 2009 in support of its third album, Crossing The Rubicon. Before embarking on a three-month North American and European tour—including a stop at First Avenue on Thursday, Nov. 5—keyboardist Jesper Anderberg spoke with The A.V. Club about being bilingual, starting the band’s own label, and the benefits of having a badass frontwoman.
The A.V. Club: You guys started playing together as teenagers—did you write your lyrics in English back then, too?
Jesper Anderberg: Yeah, we’ve always written in English. We’re from a very small town in the south of Sweden so our accent is—well, it sounds funny when you sing. Also English is a more universal language and a more useful one. It’s more interesting for forming cool sentences and not sounding too corny.
AVC: You and Felix [Rodriguez, guitarist] have worked with other bands. How do you keep your attentions separated?
JA: We write a lot and some songs fit with our band and others would be better for other bands, so we just see how that goes. Our music is, in a way, very different from other bands, so we know when it doesn’t fit. But at the same time, we’re very different people and sometimes we just want to make a metal song, you know? We write whenever we can write and we write whatever we can write—always from our hearts. It’s a hard balance, though.
AVC: Why did you decide to release Crossing The Rubicon on your own label?
JA: I don’t think we went the normal way. We’ve always loved touring so much that studio albums have always been kind of a drag—we’re hyper people, so we don’t settle well in that kind of space. When we did Living In America, we weren’t yet that good of friends, and now I think of [that album] and I don’t even know when we recorded it or how we recorded it. It’s all just a blur. We had no idea what we were doing in the studio—we were just so young. Then Dying To Say This To You wasn’t for another three or four years and took too much time. After that we were more like, “If we can do that, we can do anything.” [Laughs.] Doing it this way was more organized in a way. We didn’t have a label for a start and we had some friends we could record with, so we set up some time and just tried it. With Crossing The Rubicon, the songs feel more finished, much more polished.
AVC: Would you try this approach again?