When it came to naming her new band, Vera Sonne didn’t overthink it. “You really just need a word, then you will define it with your music,” she says. “And then stand by it, because that’s how people remember you.”
That word? Pumpegris. Don’t worry if you aren’t familiar with it – even the majority of Norwegians aren’t. Most will ask, “What the fuck does that mean?” as guitarist Astrid Garmo tells me. But Sonne is half Danish and grew up with the surrealist poems of Halfdan Rasmussen. “He wrote a sweet little poem about a pig that can pump anything,” she explains, referring to the Danish writer’s work Pumpegris og andre børnerim. In English: pumping pig.
“This kid finds this pig that pumps whatever he wants out of its nose, and asks for soda, like, ‘Please pump three-million liters of soda,’” Sonne continues. “Then he wants some more. ‘No,’ the pig says. ‘I am all empty now.’ And the kid says, ‘Oh shucks, I should have made alcohol! I should have made booze!’”
Sonne explains that Scandinavia's folk-adjacent acts tend to adopt names associated with nature or animals – “some kind of bird or the wind or the cliffs” – but she didn’t want to take things so seriously, an intention that had to start with the first thing anyone learns about you: your name. “It’s really such a musical playground for us,” she says, “so it’s great, I realise, to have a name that implies fun or playfulness.”
You’ll see those characteristics in the uneventful, fly-on-the-wall video Pumpegris put together for “Føkk det”, the lead single from their recently released debut album, Fritids, meaning ‘leisure time.’ The camera follows the band as they shoot the shit and drink booze (from bottles, not pigs), moving from cramped apartment to park to bar. Not much – not anything – happens, but the video remains faithful to the song’s origins: that pandemic-era “we-have-no-place-to-be” hangout time. And hey, perhaps Sonne sees something of herself in that alcohol-craving child from Rasmussen’s poem.
“Remembering those times when I was younger, hanging out with friends, we weren’t young enough to drink someplace, so we would drink in the backyard of the school or just wander around drinking,” Sonne explains. “So [“Føkk det” has] this wandering, disillusioned vibe.” Darker stuff underpins the song, too: it borrows a traditional hardanger fiddle tune (Norway’s national instrument) that is supposed to put you in a trance-like state, as Garmo notes. “The devil puts you in this dancing mood and you can’t stop,” Sonne adds. Though, perhaps anticipating problems with that, they transposed it into a different tuning, as fiddle player Trygve Liahagen clarifies.
The founder of Pumpegris, Sonne calls herself the captain of a “very secure ship.” But the band – whose members met at the Norwegian Academy of Music in Oslo – has become democratic and driven by each person’s different skills and interests. “I guess it started with me finding these incredible musicians and friends that wanted to build this idea I had about a folk music-based band with a more groovy, loose, and funky direction,” Sonne explains.
Indeed, the band plays around with dozens of ingredients under their broad ‘folk-fusion’ moniker: religious psalms and traditional folk tunes. Uplifting, falsetto harmonies. Sexy grooves one minute, thrashing drums the next. Noisy, punky sections, and Mikkel Bjørneboe’s always-acrobatic bass chops. Garmo, the lead guitarist, meanwhile, is an unlikely shoegaze stan, listing off upcoming gigs – Ride, Slowdive – while name-dropping contemporary American acts working in the genre, such as Trauma Ray and They Are Gutting a Body of Water. Garmo was the last member to join, meaning, for the most part, the band constructed their music without a chord instrument – arguably the reverse of conventional pop songwriting – instead relying on bass and fiddle. “That’s the shape of the tunes,” Liahagen says. Garmo’s parts, therefore, are not foundational but they colour everything in, utilising fuzz, reverb, and “sound-walls” – “weird shit” – that sit atop everything. From: https://www.thelineofbestfit.com/features/interviews/pumpegris-are-on-the-rise
