A few months ago the chart-conquering garage punk band The Hives released a song about the end of the world as we know it. The tune is called Enough Is Enough, and its splenetic message is that conformity is devouring humanity from the inside out.
“Everyone’s a little f**kin’ bitch / And I am getting sick and tired of it,” Howlin’ Pelle Almqvist, the group’s singer, proclaims. Accompanied by the remorselessly chugging twin guitars that are a Hives trademark, he goes on to complain about people who “eat anything they serve” and who “follow orders and toe the line”.
These are the words we need in 2025 – a plea to put away our phones, turn off our social media and say no to brain rot. It’s also an uncompromising message typical of The Hives, part of the early-21st-century underground-rock renaissance that also produced The Strokes and The White Stripes and whose fans include Green Day, Franz Ferdinand, The Rolling Stones (with whom they toured) and the original protest punk, Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine.
“The lyrics to that song are old. But they’re turning more and more prophetic every day. It makes more sense now than it did when we wrote it,” Almqvist, who is now 47, says of Enough Is Enough. “Which is horrible. I don’t think it’s just that I’m at an age when people start thinking things are taking a turn for the worse. It might actually be true this time.”
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There has never been a better moment for new music this five-piece from Sweden specialising in fuzzy, furious bubblegum punk. They’re at their rawest and most uncompromising on their excellent new album, The Hives Forever Forever the Hives, which arrives as rock’n’roll is surely in danger of becoming both embalmed in nostalgia and of morphing into a glorified heritage circus.
Almqvist believes people are drawn to The Hives not because their punk is perfect but because you can see its flaws, its fracture lines, the bits that aren’t exactly right. When so much of popular culture is calculated and artificial, it’s their humanity, wonky bits and all, that makes them stand out.
“It’s the opposite of having 40 writers on a pop song or making it with AI. The reason you love it is because it’s wrong and human. That’s what I like in a lot of art besides music: the stuff that’s flawed and which, because of that, becomes distinctive to whoever made it.”
That philosophy infuses The Hives Forever Forever the Hives, a thrillingly scrappy and confrontational record whose circuits sizzle with danger. As Almqvist yowls and the guitars strike up, there is a sense of not knowing what will come next. Things might go off the rails.
Occasionally they do. Not every song lands perfectly, and a few are a victory of anger over melody. Sometimes it sounds as if the singer is doing battle with the guitars rather than singing with them. Almqvist wouldn’t have it any other way. The freedom to err and be human is half the fun of being in a band.
“We get to intentionally keep that stuff in there. If we want to make a decision that’s ‘wrong’, we will. We can do whatever we want. I think that comes across and is exciting to people.”
Punks in a pop world, The Hives have long embraced the label of outsiders. They’ve never fitted in, not even back to their early days in Sweden, when they adopted the stage uniform of regulation black and white (a look they carry through to the cover of the new LP, where they wear zebra-stripe royal robes).
Coming from the remote town of Fagersta, they were regarded as bumpkins by the tastemakers in Stockholm. Their solution was to ignore Sweden entirely when they put out their 1997 debut album, Barely Legal.
“Our idea, or strategy, was that we’re never going to be popular in Sweden. We’re kind of hicks: we’re from the sticks. We’re not from the cool area of Stockholm. So we thought, if we go to Germany or Denmark, people aren’t going to know anything about us. There’s not going to be any preconceived notions.”
They knew the hipsters would never accept them. But there was also the simple matter of economics. Sweden, like Ireland, isn’t a big enough market to sustain a band. To thrive, they had to become successful elsewhere.
Weirdly, we plateaued at our peak and now we’re getting bigger again
— Howlin’ Pelle Almqvist
“In Sweden ... you can’t play every day. You can just do weekend shows. If you want gas money and you want to eat every day, you’ve got to play every day. We could only do that in mainland Europe. So before we toured Sweden we tried to go to Germany, France, Spain and other countries.
“There was an underground scene. You could play to 11 people, get gas money and go to the next show. So that’s what we did, basically ... You can’t make a living being a rock’n’roll band in Sweden unless you’re the biggest one. And we knew that we had to become popular in New York first. And then the Swedish press would think that we’re great.”
He mentions Sweden’s complicated relationship with success – the concept of “Jantelagen”, a social code of modesty and conformity that essentially means nobody should think they’re special.
“I believe that in Ireland, too, there is a tall-poppy syndrome. There’s a lot of that,” he says. “It’s like a national identity. No one is supposed to be bigger or better than anyone.”
But then, in 2004, The Hives suddenly became a lot bigger than their punk peers, thanks to their third album, Tyrannosaurus Hives. Arriving in the glory days of The White Stripes and The Strokes, the record chimed with the new vogue for back-to-basics rock music.
Outsiders all their lives, they were suddenly the toast of a scene they knew nothing about and to which they weren’t connected – or, as Pitchfork put it at the time, “This album’s got rock, it’s got roll, and it’s named after a dinosaur – what more could you ask for!”
They struggled to take it all too seriously, says Almqvist. “It was pretty cool. [But] it was funny to us, and we kind of sniggered at it. We were really suspicious and cynical about mainstream success.”
With blitzing songs such as Walk Idiot Walk and Two-Timing Touch and Broken Bones earning The Hives a new fan base, they decided to make the most of the exposure, suspecting their days in the sun would quickly come to an end. They toured themselves to the bone while the music press heralded them as saviours of rock music.
“We also have this idea that ... mainstream success, we’ll get that for one or two years. And we can coast off that and play shows. We’ll get more shows. It is going to ultimately be a good thing. You’re going to have to be cool about it. We’re going to get really big and then we’re going to get smaller. But that’s still better than where we started at.
“Now, weirdly, we plateaued at our peak and now we’re getting bigger again.”
They’ve stayed philosophical about their career, though there have been ups and downs. Recently, for instance, they were drawn into an unlikely beef with their fellow Sweden-based punks Viagra Boys, who called them “old poser corporate suits” after The Hives pretended not to have heard of them.
Almqvist says there was never any real antipathy between the two, but there was some tension, which was inflamed by social media. “It’s only good, I think, because there’s a kernel of truth in it. Viagra Boys are a little bit annoyed with us and we’re a little bit annoyed with them. But they like us and we like them. Because we’re a little bit annoyed with each other.”
Much has been written lately about the state of rock music, including whether the return of Oasis represents a second coming or the final flogging of a dying animal. Almqvist can see why audiences are so thrilled by the British band’s return.
“I do like that attitude of that music of ‘I do what I want to do’. It’s music made by humans who are not from fancy circumstances and all that stuff, and still making something transcendent. I think that’s really inspiring to people. I hope that bleeds over into liking other rock as well.
“It’s such a thing, though. I remember seeing Oasis play. I guess it was their lowest point ... to, I guess, 2,000 people in Stockholm, maybe 2007. You never know what is going to happen in culture.”
Nobody is more surprised by the rude health of The Hives than the band itself. It’s going on 28 years since their debut: if their career were following the script, people really ought to have stopped caring. Instead the group’s fan base has expanded hugely across the past several tours. And it’s growing younger: fresh from supporting Arctic Monkeys in Ireland and around Britain last year, they’ve noticed their audience trending towards Gen Z.
“It’s not only inspiring,” says Almqvist, “It’s also necessary for rock to stay alive.”
Everyone wins when a fan base starts to skew younger. The kids get to tear themselves away from social media, and the older fans can share in the excitement of an audience for whom all of this – the moshing, the sweat, the spilt beer – is new and dangerous, he says.
“It’s almost like it’s also more fun for the older people in the crowd that there’s young people going nuts. We have the Arctic Monkeys crowd to thank for that. It was 12 shows in [Ireland and Britain] alone – 100,000 people or whatever. And most of those that were there were young. That was important for our growth. So thank you, Arctic Monkeys and their fans.”
The Hives Forever Forever the Hives is released on Friday, August 29th
