Viagra Boys // Welfare Jazz

Year 0001

3.5 stars out of 5

If you happen to be the music supervisor of a television series right now, this album must feel like a complete godsend. Out of these 13 tracks, there are more than a handful of raucous cuts bursting with snarky humor and genre-melding garage rock chaos. This is the second full-length album from the quintet out of Stockholm, Sweden. Comparing Welfare Jazz to their 2018 debut, Street Worms, listeners will find the same blasting basslines and outsider saxophone work, with a much wider palette of characterization the band is eager to utilize. On this record, they're less like Idles and Fontaines D.C. and more like a funnier version of the Black Keys or the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. There's a fun game you can play with this record. Listen to it track by track and picture what TV show's end credits it would go best with. There's the literal ones ("Ain't Nice" for Good Girls and "Creatures" for What We Do in the Shadows) and the more tonal ones ("Toad" in The Righteous Gemstones and "To the Country" in Better Call Saul), going to show how wildly illustrative this album happens to be.

— Nick Warren