Music

‘We weren’t cool but we had each other’: Alphabeat are back after 6 years and are still pop and proud


At a time when Carly Rae Jepsen, Charli XCX and Troye Sivan are lauded for saving the charts, it’s easy to forget that in the noughties, pop music wasn’t so popular.

With indie taking over, guitars, Fred Perry t-shirts and mySpace fringes were cool, and anyone performing pop enthusiastically was not. But that didn’t stop Alphabeat.

The Danish six-piece band – made up of Anders SG, Stine Bramsen, Anders B, Rasmus Nagel, Anders Reinholdt and Troels Hansen – debuted in 2006 and gained success with their first album This Is Alphabeat, but it wasn’t until 2008, when the album and its ridiculously catchy single Fascination were released across Europe, that they really shot to fame.

The group achieved hits with 10,000 Nights Of Thunder, Boyfriend, The Spell and DJ before they parted ways in 2013, but six years on they are back, and are still flying the flag for pop music.

Ahead of their appearance on The Graham Norton Show, singers Stine and Anders SG explained that it was the UK that made them proud of their pure pop status.

‘You like going out, and it’s a lot cheaper to go watch an upcoming band here,’ Anders told Metro.co.uk. ‘We started playing all around the country and people would turn up because it’s not very expensive, and that’s a really healthy culture to create new bands. We focus a lot on the live performance, so we played our asses off when we came over here. And you have a huge appreciation for pop music.’

Stine agreed: ‘It was not really until we moved to London that we started to say we were proud of playing pop music.’

And while they don’t feel any snobbery around pop anymore, that could just be because they’ve formed their own little happy bubble.

‘It’s easy for us, because there’s six people in the band, we’ve got our gang,’ Anders explained. ‘That’s what we’ve done since we started. We started playing pop music when we were 15, 16 in a small town in Denmark, where everyone played indie or heavy metal. We weren’t cool, but we had each other.’

After three albums, Alphabeat decided to go on hiatus in 2013 to work on side projects. But pop purists were delighted earlier this year when they dropped their new single Shadows, followed up by the infectious and tongue-in-cheek I Don’t Know What’s Cool Anymore in August.

‘That definitely came from a genuine feeling,’ Stine laughed. ‘Anders said it out loud one day when we were in the studio. We met up and were working on a song even though we had already finished the album.’

‘Our studio is in quite a hip area, and we saw this guy outside the studio wearing a biking helmet,’ Anders continued.

The band has a new approach to writing (Picture: Lorne Thomson/Redferns)

‘He was going to a meeting and he brought the biking helmet as an accessory, he kept it on throughout the meeting. He is a bonafide cool guy. I just said “I don’t know what is cool anymore” and Stine said we need to make a song about that.’

The two singles come ahead of the band’s fourth album Don’t Know What’s Cool Anymore, set for release this November, and while the unmistakable Alphabeat enthusiasm and 80s-influenced bops are still there, the band took an entirely different approach to writing it.

Anders said: ‘One of the things we talked about when we started working on the album was that we wanted to keep the core – the six of us going to the studio as a band, and not trying to get computers tangled up in the process.

‘We just wanted to make some good tunes that everyone in the band felt comfortable about and not focus on just making singles. That’s been a positive process, because we’ve ended up with a lot of good songs but it’s not been a struggle to get that super-hit.

‘Sometimes you write a song and it doesn’t feel like a hit, but a lot of people will get into it. If you’re focused on the singles, sometimes you lose those really good songs. We’ve got nine songs and there’s not one of them that I feel like we could do without.’

Stine added that they also didn’t want to listen to what was ‘trendy’. ‘We decided early on that we would try and write songs that we love and that felt right in our guts – and that sound like a pop band.’

Alphabeat’s comeback seems to have occurred naturally. After Anders SG and Anders B penned some new songs together, they didn’t know what to do with them. Cue Anders calling up the rest of the gang for a jam sesh, that turned into a reunion and a new album.

‘It made sense. These could be the songs that Alphabeat wrote in 2019,’ Stine said. ‘And we missed each other. Genuinely feeling that we wanted to spend time together and having inspiration for writing this album, that’s what made us want to do it now. I think we’re appreciating everything a bit more now, because we haven’t been going at it for 10 years without a break.

‘The album is Alphabeat, kind of back to our roots, but also with a fresh energy and maybe more guts than before. We’ve written songs that are more personal – even if they are super pop, the lyrics have got more personal, we are writing about stuff that we feel something about.

‘We’ve been really focused on putting that special energy that happens when the six of us get together into our songs. And you can feel us really enjoying it. Because Alphabeat faking it doesn’t work.’

Alphabeat’s new album Don’t Know What’s Cool Anymore is out 1 November via Absolute Label Services.



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