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Millencolin.
 Ten years after the release of their first album 'Same Old Tunes', Swedish punk rock favourites Millencolin returned to the studio to record their sixth album 'Kingwood.' On the eve of Millencolin's UK tour with Good Charlotte, guitarist Mathias Farm is feeling optimistic about 'Kingwood,' which the band feels represents the most 'Millencolin' record they've made to date ("I think it's our best album ever, but it would be sad if I didn't think so").
'Kingwood'- a reference to vocalist Nikola Sarcevic's Kenwood stereo, and the band's influences- sees Millencolin take a step back from the garage-rock direction that 2002's gold-selling 'Home From Home' was taking, and return to their punk roots. "I dunno, it's a full circle I guess," Farm muses. "It was exactly ten years between our first album and while we recorded this, and we've been going through a lot of different ideas on how to write songs. Me and Nikola, we wrote some faster songs, and we realised it was really fun to do that... It wasn't anything we really tried to do, it just happened. It's got a mix between the old Millencolin and the new Millencolin, so it was really good thing and it felt really fresh to do it."
The album also finds Millencolin tackling some of their most serious material yet. Sarcevic released his solo album 'Lock Krock Sport' to wide acclaim last year, and the personal release he found in that project allowed him to reflect on the world around him for the new Millencolin album. "It was a great thing for him to do [and] it was a really good thing for the band," Farm, who sold merchandise on the solo tour, explains. "He did his solo album, and it was really personal, so this time he tried to do something different lyrically. This time he writes a little bit more about the things that happen around him. We tackle a little bit more bigger issues, I guess. There's actually one song [which] is about death, and we've never been writing anything like that before."
The song he refers to, Farewell My Hell, is one of the most powerful on the album, and is in fact a deeply personal song for Sarcevic. "Nikola had a brother who disappeared almost two years ago. It affected the band in a way that we just had to take it easy and just let him take time to reflect on everything. It was a really tough time."
But it hasn't all been tough times for Millencolin of late. The recording of the album was a lot of fun for the band, if the video diary that the band put up on its website was anything to go by. "We were recording all the music in our home town, in our room," Farm reflects. "It was really good, 'cause you could go there and when you hang out it's like being on tour, but when you were done for the day you could just go home to your house and have your regular life." The band also found that a private in-joke began to take on monstrous proportions- in the form of the 'Shnoboliser." "It's a joke you know? It's a tuner," Farm laughs. "But there's actually a Millencolin forum in North America and they watched [the video diary], and they were making a big thing about 'oh, what's the Shnoboliser? What could it be?" They got really upset about it. So it was just a joke that go out of hand. I think it's hilarious, isn't it?"
Millencolin hope to hit our shores sometime in September, and are looking forward to the trip - and why wouldn't they, considering the success they've had here. Sold out tours, two gold-albums and 'Home From Home' debuting at number one in SA. But, when I put the question of why they've struck such a chord with Australian fans, even Farm draws a blank. "I dunno, maybe because of ABBA?" he laughs.
"The thing that's good in Australia is that people act like Europeans, and if we go the US people are Americans, and sometimes they're not that open minded. We all love touring in Australia, but when it comes down to the shows, it doesn't really matter where you are: if it's a good show, it's a good show. We have a lot of good shows in Australia; of course, it's always great there. I tend to like people more in Australia then other parts of the world, 'cause they're more like me."
Matt Vesely
 | 'Kingwood' is out now through Shock. |
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