Viagra Boys – Viagr Aboys review

Having boldly scoffed at giving their band a suitable for work searchable name, Stockholm’s Viagra Boys have been erm..pricking our consciences for the best part of a decade. Released in the aftermath of the pandemic their last album Cave World for instance took aim anti-vaxxers and concpiracy theorists with skewering glee, only for some of their performative dumbness to be wildly misunderstood.

This time their densely tattooed front man Sebastian Murphy is he claims a reformed character, summing his state of relationship bliss up on River King with “Go get Chinese food at the local spot on a Monday night/Tastes like sour meat but I’ve had worse so I don’t mind”.

Viagr Aboys tries accordingly to focus more inward, although the sloppy toe tapping post punk of opener Man Made of Meat, hippie sceptic Pyramid of Health and Waterboy’s desultory funk take aim at targets worth taking aim at. The best tune though is about Murphy’s dog, Uno II putting itself in the mind of a pooch being gradually turned into 100% gums by a maverick vet. Clever and slightly more refined, it’s an outlier on a record which despite the sell was never going to let anyone off the hook.

You can read a full review here.