A quick tour of Swedish chart music
This list is mainstream Swedish artists that have been fun to listen to while learning Swedish. It doesn’t include some good bands that sing fully in English – for example I hadn’t realised until a Swedish teacher mentioned them that Millencolin were Swedish. There’s probably some fantastic niche bands but I don’t yet know how to find them yet.
The key to listening to the sings as a non speaker is to just enjoy the general sound, but then its worth a google for the lyrics in English to get a feel for what the theme is about. If learning Swedish from scratch I’d watch some YouTube videos on the Swedish alphabet to get the sounds which will let you work out the sounds of new written words. After that you can start reading the Swedish lyrics and singing along to parts of the song
The first group that sounds like bands I used to listen to are Bolaget. This first song is roughly about being drunk and asking friends what the heck was in the drink, and getting help home. “Jag kan inte gå” == I can not walk. They do some other great songs too along a similar theme.
Sweden is a long country, with a big distance between the cities in the South like Stockholm, and the people living in the north. One of the artists, Hooja (the j here is pronounced like an English “y”) sings a lot about life in the north and makes lots of tongue-in-cheek songs. They feature a remote controlled moose on their stage when playing live. This was/is one of my favourite artists when learning because the songs were fun and I liked working out some of the slang that gets included and isn’t in the textbooks.
This next song is from the same artist but it’s about the fictional culture shock of the character going into a famous nightclub in Stockholm and wishing he had carried some moonshine in with him. It includes mention of “vaska” (the barman asks him if he wants to “vaska”) which is unique to these Swedish nightclubs where instead of spraying champagne they pour it down a sink. There are some internet articles that describe it.
When they play live they have a remote controlled moose on stage and chainsaws.
Miss Li is everywhere and the lyrics are usually funny and the tunes fun. In “Komplicared” shes singing about what a nightmare partner the character in the song is admitting to being. There’s an English version of it too but the Swedish feels like the lyrics flow just a little better. She has a giant list of good songs with different styles.
This next one takes a bit of introducing. The video is where a culture clash is being shown. It features Raggare culture which is a bit hard to explain but revolves around a car-cruising style that is roughly similar to 1960s US style. The video features some visitors to the city arriving in a Tesla to a Raggare meet. I think the song itself is a cover.
This next one isn’t Swedish and anyone Swedish is going to be pointing at it immediately. It’s in Norweigan. The important thing here is that the two languages are considered mutually intelligible – by learning Swedish you can understand almost all of the words in this song. It’s also upbeat for winter days (“jovial” is roughly as per the English).
