If absence makes the heart grow fonder, The Cardigans should be welcomed back to these shores with open arms. In the five years since we’ve heard from the consummate melody-makers, their native Sweden has exploded on the international music scene, with bands like The Hives and The Soundtrack of Our Lives pushing aside The Cardigans’ featherweight pop in favour of a rockier template.
No matter-the unflappable Malmo quintet has never concerned themselves with popularity contests. They kept to their own timeline to produce last year’s Long Gone Before Daylight, which eschews the current taste for Swedish garage-rock in favour of graceful, dreamy pop-though pals from The Hives (Howlin’ Pete Almquist) and TSOOL (Ebbot Lundberg) do show up to lend a hand on backing vocals.
“We’ve never been really trendy-we’re sort of timeless, I think,” singer Nina Persson muses over the line from the first stop on their current North American tour, prior to their sold-out Toronto show at Lee’s Palace last week (the band’s first visit to these parts since 1998’s Gran Turismo). “Once we did hook onto a trend with the Gran Turismo record-that was when bands started to use computers for recording-that record didn’t age very well with us. So we’ve been a little bit conservative about what we want to be, and basing everything we do on the songs we write and not really expectations of record companies or whatever trend in the music scene. Our stubbornness has kind of saved us in that sense.”
That determination paid off when the band was dropped from their US label (Mercury/Universal) between records. While they remained with Universal in all other territories (including Canada), the band decided to go with smaller label KOCH in the US, which delayed the release of Daylight a full year. The album hits stores there later this month, coinciding with the current tour.
Industry battles aside, what’s kept the sweater set away for so long? To hear Persson tell it, the very future of The Cardigans was a big question mark following the draining Gran Turismo tour. Persson and bassist Magnus Sveningsson both released solo projects in the interim, and the group found themselves wondering if the end was near. The long-time friends, who started the group as teenagers over a decade ago, rented a house in LA and simply hung out together for two weeks. The stay bolstered their musical and personal relationship, and they decided to forge ahead with another record.
The ensuing Daylight, which borrows from both The Cardigans’ winsome earlier records and the countrified sound of Persson’s A Camp solo project, proved to be a bit of a struggle. Wanting the tracks to have a more live, immediate sound than the electro burbling of the previous record, the band went through sessions in Spain and England before finally finishing up the album at their home studio in Malmo.
Persson, who writes all the Cardigans’ lyrics, is still clearly a fool for love, but yesteryear’s sweetness and light is now tempered with a more mature perspective.
“After Gran Turismo, which I find very hopeless-and I was really depressed when I wrote that record-I wanted this one to sound a little more hopeful. We still talk about difficulties in relationships and love and life, but I wanted to add a light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel feel to this record.
“We’ve been through hell and back,” she continues. ” We are quite a solid unit these days. It didn’t come easily, but we feel very self-confident. We always feel very fragile when it comes to making new music, because we have such high expectations of ourselves. But when it comes to making decisions about what we are, we feel very sure about that right now.”