The rise of Sweden’s post-pop underground

Lover’s Skit “Misconception” stillNovember 28, 2025MusicScene And SpottedThe rise of Sweden’s post-pop underground

From trip-hop vocalist Venus Anon to punk-leaning rave duo Lover’s Skit, we speak to five Swedish artists seeking out the sweet spot between Max Martin-style pop and the hyper-online world of Drain Gang

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It’s Wednesday night at Stoke Newington’s The Waiting Room. “Meds will keep me sane / ‘Cause peace it will prevail,” sings Venus Anon, who has flown in from Stockholm to be here. A projection of spliced-together archive footage illuminates the stage: fawns play in the snow and everything is stark and white; camels trek through the desert and the room is thrust into darkness. Soundwise, it’s like Oklou by way of Music-era Madonna.

Nearly a thousand miles away in Gothenburg, Dunya Fest is taking place. It’s the sophomore festival for the Gothenburg label, In This Dunya. The lineup isn’t just made up of Swedish natives, but international acts who see themselves as taking part in more of a cultural initiative than a straight festival. Last year they included Oklou and Jawnino – this year it’s James Massiah. “There will always be a need for a scene that supports our kind of music,” says Gothenburg born and raised Raghd, one of the festival’s headliners. Elsewhere, Stockholm duo Lovers Skit are taking to the stage at a pub in Brixton. They’ve found their audience amongst revellers at The Windmill, champions of the post-punk strain of guitar music that Lovers Skit peddle.

“It’s really dark here and we don’t have a lot to do,” Venus tells me. “But that’s what makes good music come alive.” She’s not being poetic. As the third largest exporter of music in the world, Sweden is pop. It gave the world ABBA and later down the line Robyn, Icona Pop, Lykke Li and Zara Larsson. But the country’s reputation as a factory for sunny pop doesn’t quite capture the reality of living there.

“The times when Sweden made a lot of pop, that was a long time ago,” Raghd tells me. She joins our call from a hair salon, where she’s getting fresh braids ahead of Dunya Fest. “We still love that music, but Sweden doesn’t look the same. The politics are different. Like, we have a different migration policy than what we did back then. Our government’s more right-leaning.” Despite what you might have learned in geography, Sweden isn't actually the ‘happiest place on Earth’ and it’s not just down to politics. The country’s climate is brutal – nine months of grey, three months of light, as Izza Gara puts it. “I got so good at producing while living up North [in Gothenburg] because the weather was so depressing,” she continues.

Sweden has always had an underground running parallel to the pop machine. In the early 2000s, a large chunk came from the Gothenburg label Service, who released records by indie-pop band The Embassy. Then came Yung Lean and Drain Gang, pioneering a darker, weirder sound than the twee alt-pop of the noughties. “I salute my brothers that came before me,” says Venus, laughing. “It’s fun to have them as a part of the legacy.” But as much as the scene around Drain Gang, as pbeatgirl put it, “heralded a new era of electronic music,” it was always something of a boys’ club. “I just think that [our scene] doesn't have to be a Swedish guy singing about pain,” adds Venus.

That’s where these artists come in, carving out a scene that’s less provocative than Drain Gang’s ‘suicidal robot’ sounds, but no less honest. It reflects a different relationship with the internet too: less about meme-heavy irony and more about cherry-picking cultural touchstones from the recent past. Izza Gara’s visuals nod to Y2K pop aesthetics; Venus Anon channels trip-hop textures, pbeatgirl favours sparse, atmospheric production; Raghd goes heavier and dancier; Lovers Skit lean into 00s grunge.

It’s all there, thriving in spite of an infrastructure that doesn’t necessarily want it to. Last year, the Swedish government introduced hefty budget cuts threatening the educational organisations and music venues which play an integral role in nurturing young talent. The motivation? A “shifted focus to education that leads to ‘real jobs’.” “We have had to create our own spaces, and that’s what we're standing on today,” Raghd explains.

And so they have. Gothenburg’s Oceanen holds over 100 events each year. Spice99 has become a hub for the scene over in Stockholm. Dunya Fest draws British acts; Venus plays North London venues. The reach goes both ways. “People are getting a bit bored and starting to take matters into their own hands,” explains Raghd. There’s a certain frailty, but there’s also a resilience that belies, as Izza Gara puts it, the “introverted and reserved” nature of Swedish people. “We have each other’s backs,” she tells me.

Below, we speak to five faces of this new Swedish post-pop sound.

VENUS ANON

“Gothenburg is like when you smoke a blunt,” singer and producer Venus Anon tells me. “If you’re in a good mood, you become in an even better mood. But if I’m in a bad mood and I go to Gothenburg, it’s like, there is only trauma.” Venus left Gothenburg for Stockholm when she was seven. There she attended Rytmus music school, did a brief stint at law school, then sacked that off for her true calling. “I saw this video of myself playing live and was like, I love that. Music is what makes life worth living.”

To be fair, it seems like she made the right decision. On “Nothing’s Really Over, Not With Anyone”, whimsical production transforms breakbeats into something unexpectedly melancholic. “I’d rather have the occasional frog jump out of my mouth / Than pride the size of the Shibuya,” she sings, delivering siren-like vocal riffs. With “Celestial”, her most recent single, she’s found herself a trip-hop sweet spot: it’s prime All Saints via Frou Frou that’s elevated by live strings which keep it from feeling like nostalgia porn. What if “Celestial” went viral, I ask. “I’d be doing heavy drugs if it was a really fast, crazy thing. It’d be the end,” is Anon’s reply.

RAGHD

While the other artists have fled Sweden’s chilly North coast, Raghd is still in Gothenburg. She’s glad of it. “Nobody lives there and I don’t have a lot of peers, but I don’t think I would’ve wanted it any different,” she tells me. “In loneliness, something else can grow.”

Evidently, what’s grown is a sound with a kind of metamorphic quality. Raghd’s music could be rapped along to in the car or played at the club, but also left on in the background while you do very little. That mutability is played out within each track too. The jungle-esque drums that hit thirty seconds into “Easy Go!” catch you off guard. You don’t expect bars from British-Nigerian rapper DEELA on “Arrest Me”, but it works. The latter is a track off Raghd’s latest EP, Significant Value, which takes its name from a statistics term. “It means there’s a very low probability that something’s occurred by chance,” Raghd explains. “That’s how I feel about life, basically.”

PBEATGIRL

“I remember being approached by a girl I’d never met before, saying she was obsessed with a track that I had uploaded on SoundCloud,” pbeatgirl tells me over email. “That conversation really changed my way of thinking about my own music.” It’s fitting. Her music feels like an ode to SoundCloud at its purest: unapologetically niche, resolutely DIY and untethered from any kind of machinery. “I’m getting more comfortable with the idea of doing genreless music in my own little corner of the world,” she adds.

For three years, that corner was a Gothenburg harbour flat surrounded by heavy machinery. “It’s probably my most insane housing situation to date,” she writes. She’s since returned to Stockholm, though the music has remained the same: hard to pin down. While a track like “Drown it out” is downtempo and ambient, “Text Me When You Get Home” – where she links up with Magnus Larsson and DJ Beverage – sounds like it could’ve soundtracked a cutscene in a Danny Boyle film. “There’s definitely a scene bubbling, but it feels very eclectic and free,” she continues. “Everyone is doing their thing but with the support of everyone else. It’s so much fun performing live knowing we’re all gonna be there, hyping each other up.”

IZZA GARA

Watch the video for Izza Gara’s “Favour” and you’d assume she’s straight pop: choreographed routines, vocals that have been processed until they shimmer and earworm-y hooks. “Would you want me in your speaker babe,” she repeats. But beneath the gloss, things tilt sideways. Izza came up through Gothenburg’s hip-hop dance scene. “It’s more left field than Stockholm,” she tells me. “I started dancing after I saw the video for ‘Work It’ by Missy Elliott. I like her music. It can be weird, but it’s still got that pop structure that makes you feel comfortable.” That tension runs through Izza Gara’s work – she plays with the pop facade. “Love Me” cracks at the edges with off-kilter rhythms, then “3000” abandons it entirely. London-based rapper Miso Extra joins her, rapping in Japanese over darker textures that feel worlds away from “Favour”. On “OVU”, the jangly percussion feels like a nod to her heritage. “My mom’s also Turkish, so I was around a lot of that music,” she says of her eclectic influences. “And I used to listen to a lot of battle music with weird beats. That’s been a big part of it all.”

Being able to keep that weirdness alive is exactly why Izza refuses to sign to a label. She compares it to her painting days: once she got a commission and money changed hands, the work stopped being hers. “It became an anxiety-inducing thing to do,” she explains. “I felt pressured.” I ask if she sees that happening with music. “No, because I haven’t signed anything,” she replies, laughing.

LOVER’S SKIT

“A scene doesn’t really exist until you say that it does,” says Ove Jerndal, one half of Stockholm duo Lover’s Skit. He and vocalist Nathalia Aránguiz are half-joking. They know they’re part of something, but defining it feels slippery. Sometimes they’re an offshoot of guitar music, other times it’s breakbeat at their core. “We have a clique in Stockholm where we’re leaning into jungle music and stuff like that,” says Nathalia.

The duo formed during the pandemic, making music in their bedrooms before hitting Stockholm’s nightlife once lockdowns were lifted. “After the pandemic, we turned 18 and got to see the club,” Nathalia tells me. “That really influenced our music. It made it more dance-y, more hip-hop and rap.” Elsewhere, the Stockholm influence arrives uninvited. “It was taken in the middle of the summer at a dinner party, but it’s still dark,” says Nathalia of their artwork for All Rights Reserved. “It’s hard to not get that in your aesthetics when that’s how it looks here.”

Anything I’ve missed, I ask – any shoutouts? The duo credit Sonic Erection, a Stockholm collective that’s running clubs, booking acts and even getting involved in the visuals. “They did our first music video. They’re keeping a lot of it alive,” Nathalia adds.

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