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

Bolaget

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 have a great collection of other songs, all best listened to at high volume some morning when you’re getting ready to get stuff done, or annoyed at some life obstacle.

…and of course some things are better live

“After Work” is self-explanatory and has some English phrases mixed in.

Hooja

If you look at a map you’ll see that Sweden is a long country at approximately 1,600km long. There’s a big distance and culture change 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.

The first one is about recycling and has an entertaining video:

This next song is about the culture shock of the character going into a famous nightclub in Stockholm (in the south) 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 the Stockholm nightclubs where instead of spraying champagne they pour it down a sink. There are some internet articles that describe it.

When they play live it looks awesome, they have a remote controlled moose on stage and chainsaws. The panelled trousers they are wearing are almost a uniform up north (and super-comfy). I don’t know how they stay cool on stage with the big hat and fleece.

Miss Li

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.

She does a lot of other songs which all stand alone well so its hard to pick a few other the others. But another song similar to above is “X” in which the character describes their list of ex-partners and what was wrong with them, in a comedy style.

In this next one she sings about bumping into Jesus in the pub. It’s got a fun-clunky piano track.

Sofie Svensson

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.

She does lots of similar-styled songs.

Other Oddities

A pumping song about trying to escape the police with a car full of people while going too fast on the ice.

I think the video makes this one. You don’t need to understand Swedish to understand the video but you might need to watch it twice.

This next one isn’t Swedish and anyone Swedish is going to be pointing at it immediately. It’s in Norwegian. 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. The title and main lyric “jovial” is roughly as per the English word – it’s about being happy despite what life throws at you.