Bio

We are Lilou & John, a genre-fluid indie band combining psychological, poetic lyrics with deep, intrusive female vocals, delving through the darkest corners of the human psyche. This is our story.

100 Faces (2016)

We began our journey with a mission: to revitalize european culture with the depth and mythology of an older world, combined with a modern sound, and a female voice that went deep into the soul.

Our debut EP was packed with dark flavor: folklore, alienation, the surveillance state, a complex break-up, and childhood trauma. The EP was widely regarded as “groundbreaking” and Lilou’s chilling vocals were described as “mesmerizing” by Meadow Music, and Emerging Indie Bands wrote that the music “is able to traverse the intense introspection leaving the audience not feeling isolated rather sensing a coexistence with the isolated silos around.”

Even though we settled for a “radio-friendly sound,” and told the studio guy to make it as mainstream as possible, several critics refused to review it, with the only motivation being that the emotional impact went far outside of their comfort zone. We called the style “helter shelter,” to wrap up the versatile vocals and the storytelling that often confused listeners who looked for conformity.

From the very beginning we attracted an audience of existential outcasts, disillusioned punks, dark souls, and political radicals who praised the depth, dread, and beauty. “I had given up all hope of contemporary culture,” a fan wrote. Over the years this has come to be hallmark of our music: a constant desire to explore that which nobody else dares to explore.

Dissidentica (2017)

100 Faces had been a huge success for our small, unsigned indie duo, with followers on every continent after a Colombian guy bought the EP. The biggest radio station in Rome — according to the host — played the EP, and like a bushfire we spread in the dry grass.

But nothing lasts forever. It was time to pick a fight with the system. After 100 Faces, John — the democratic idealist — wrote a few free-speech articles criticizing the corruption, scapegoating and totalitarianism he saw in the education system, media and government. Lilou warned him that people would twist it into a political manifesto and she was of course on spot. When it blew up and a local newspaper completely ignored his criticism against the fourth estate — and instead tried to get him fired from his job, half the studios in the country bolted like virtue-signalers from a leper, we lost four drummers, and a local Swedish Radio gatekeeper who had invited us for a live broadcast suddenly wanted to interrogate us on air to warn listeners of the “potentially harmful” content. We said the songs dealt with feeling alienated and breaking up. She said it was standard procedure. We refused. She was the official start of our defiant years 2017-2019.

On the parking lot outside the radio building we swore an oath to fight back against group-think, mass hysteria, and hive mentality, through our music. Three simple rules would guide us:

First, always focus all critique toward totalitarianism, corruption, group-think, and human behavior.

Second, always make it personal, with stories revolving around the individuals that together create the sum of society.

Third, always keep it non-partisan, explore the plethora of movements, ideas and undercurrents that shape the dissident sphere.

“Dissident music is sadly performed by activists, not artists,” a friend remarked. “You go beyond that.”

And indeed we did. The 8-track album Dissidentica was a groundbreaking mix of rhythm and resistance. An American EDM artist we had a minor collab with wrote he broke down in tears to Spirit of America. A former fan accidentally shared the music, got trampled by the herd, and reported us to Spotify for being meritocratic evildoers. We played the don’t-tread-on-me singalong Payback Day live in Norway. Fifteen people and a dog showed up, and the merry bunch joined in on the chorus.

Swedish newspaper Nya Tider ran an interview about our dysfunctional childhoods and how it had shaped our fearless approach to controversy and sincerity. We rapidly grew a fan base of renegades, roughnecks, radicals, and other lovely freaks who appreciated our three Dissidentica rules and their call for truth over denial.

Next Year in Jerusalem — a song about Theodore Herzl set in the late 19th century — incited a rumor that we were Zionists. Adding to the confusion, John revealed that his grandma cheated on her Jewish husband with a German soldier during the war, and nobody knew who knocked her up. Listeners were divided — were we a covert Mossad operation, or a sleeping NSDAP cell? A West Africa-based music critic called us sonic UFOs, and an anonymous incel added “right wing extremists” — whatever that is. Trekkers? — to our long line of honorary mentions.

We were literally Schrödinger’s indie band.

Eldbarn (2017)

Dissidentica had been a gale and now we walked into the storm on the Gothenburg book fair, with our 2017 novel Eldbarn (“Fire Child”), a story about a girl growing up with an abusive father, who sets course not for surrender but revenge. Hardline art critic Joakim Andersen praised the dark mystic language, but the depth of the story made the publisher scared that it would mess up the heads of young readers. In a review they warned potential buyers that it could inspire suicide.

The same local newspaper who had written a defaming hit piece to get John fired, attempted a second character assassination right before the book fair. The journalist asked how our bosses and coworkers had reacted to our dangerous book-writing, and we said everybody had put safety pins in their noses and sung Sheena Is a Punk Rocker. They actually printed it, and a sophisticated colleague lamented that we had destroyed her reputation as a respectable lady. Her iconic question still rings: “why would one tell silly jokes in a serious news article?”

Patriot Child (2018)

We doubled down. Informers are everywhere, but free speech is worth a holiday in sunny Vorkuta. So, possessed by the old fire-breather Heraclitus, we released a punk rock EP in 2018 to really give them reason to deplatform us.

The album was well received among fans who weren’t intimidated by the brutal sound. Big punk and metal sites such as Punk Online and Death Metal Underground appreciated the sound and attitude, and a critic from LA who called himself “Thurston Hunger” wrote that “Lilou sings to defy multinational corporations as well as conventional musical keys. It’s fascinating in a harrowing manner.”

The track Generation Identitaire sent nervous twitches down the face of quite a few. It was based on a book by Markus Willinger, a declaration of war against the failed parent generation of 1968.

Enemy of the Matrix drew inspiration from Hávamál. We had literally morphed into Freyja & Óðinn. Lilou loved the punky screaming and in the electric guitars John found his mojo. But punk is a short, sharp, shock, and it lasted only for one EP.

Airing from Kolyma (2018)

Dissidentica had examined the fringes of our therapeutical neuro-society, Patriot Child had lashed out at its core. It was time for a new move, so we resurrected the late 1960s Swedish progg-movement with a new acoustic freedom-first EP in the summer of 2018.

The song Free Woman spread rapidly on Hungarian alternative media. We heard from a nice old Jász lady who called it her “battle hymn,” and a friendly hun called Attila (for real!) translated the song to Hungarian.

A review in the major libertarian magazine Nyheter Idag called us a “cult band,” and questioned why Swedish Radio never played us. Another critic called us “the musical scourge of political correctness,” a third called us “culture warriors,” and a fourth described us as a protest band in the tradition of Nina Simone and Buffy Saint-Marie.

We were just apes diagnosing the zoo-goers. We had no color except the mix of light and dark in our souls. We were nice to the friendly and naughty to the unfriendly.

Iconoclastic (2019)

After Airing from Kolyma had tapped into the general discontent of our frontline continent, we decided to move away from progg. We had always used recording studios but the stiff feel limited our energy, and the budget issue raised concern in itself. We desperately needed another way to produce music. A big studio — who asked to be anonymous to avoid negative press — loved the sound and originality, but needed 30,000 SEK (3,000 USD) for an EP. We who rejected welfare handouts out of sheer principle had no such free money to spend.

We therefore decided to try to become our own producers. We looked at Apple’s GarageBand and found a DAW that was easy enough to use for noobs like us, and still adequately versatile to fit our needs. In the local music shop we found a cheap portable recording device, two even cheaper microphones, and a bunch of cords. Experimentation led us down a narrow path and there, on the ground, we found the crown of music and picked it up with two devilish smiles.

The result was the infamous EDM album Iconoclastic in 2019, a high-octane set of eight subversive tracks that a fan compared to seeing The Clash live in 1977. The title track was a modernized English version of Avanti Ragazzi di Buda, and Pasokification was praised by a marxist as a “damn good song” in a mail conversation, and a nationalist wrote he used to play it on max volume in his car.

USS Donald Trump turned POTUS into a metamorphic warship-megalodon chomping his way through the ocean, just to show that psychology triumphs political statements. A Swedish DJ expat in Poland reached out for a remix, and an Irish DJ asked for CDs for a contrarian party in Dublin. We never heard from him again. Poor sod.

The album was our loudest and proudest blasphemy ever. It was heard across the Atlantic where we found a growing audience in a loosely organized fan club called the WTFers. Our first fan club manager was banned from social media for misbehavin’, but our second — an avid poster of L&J-related cute animal memes — lasted until we skipped most social media altogether in 2024.

But, it was getting boring to make protest-inspired music. We wanted to make music for a far older mindset — the mythical realm of ulfheðnar and völur, in pursuit of musical umami. After Iconoclastic followed two years of solitude with only two singles.

The album had been our mightiest roar and also our last album from the defiant years 2017-2019, when we released Dissidentica, Patriot Child and Airing from Kolyma. We stood like T-Rex at the rim of the Mesozoic era, looking at the fire ball falling from the sky, with a tiny rodent at its huge feet. One had to die for the other to be born.

Gospel X (2019)

Iconoclastic had changed our perception of recording forever, because for the first time we had a philosophy of work process that we could apply directly to our production, without having to deal with external opinions. The Dissidentica rules got an addition in our poetry-first approach: 1) write the lyrics, 2) add melody and vocals to tell the story, 3) create an arrangement to enhance the voice.

Our defiant years were over, and the introspective years of 2019-2023 began, where we gradually returned to the emotional state of mind on 100 Faces. We stopped bashing the power centers of this world. Instead, we moved on with a new single Gospel X in 2019. It was an esoteric EDM-ride toward Jerusalem — a good depiction of our journey away from outward controversy to inward tranquility. It was our first single and the first release we didn’t promote at all, except for a Twitter post that ran “Santa ain’t coming for Christmas. The Lord is.”

We set out on a new journey, like Tancred of Antioch, driven not by short-sighted nostalgia or submissive idealism, but by the heroic drive that once characterized Europe — a tiny continent of explorers, creators and warriors who conquered the entire world and then succumbed to virtue signaling. Cortés did not create New Spain by the grace of his virtue — he did it by the size of his testicles. Napoleon perished on St Helena for the crime of being too fucking awesome.

It was a personal resurrection. Like Andrew Ryan we moved our Rapture deep below the waves. No gods or kings. Only man.

Stray Wolf (2020)

Gospel X dragged us toward a more ambient soundscape that we developed further on our 2020 single Stray Wolf. It was a sharp pivot away from the years of punk defiance.

Stray Wolf had two tracks: a Nietzschean rocker about the lonely ride away from political mediocrity, and a dystopian hellscape about the manufactured mass hysteria of Covid, recorded and released during the height of the pandemic and the lockdowns. The poetrycast Conversations With The Wind played it to their introspective audience and it was well-received despite the lack of marketing.

Joakim Andersen compared it with Depeche Mode and Danzig, and praised the “visual soundscape” and “Lilou’s dark voice.” Just like Gospel X it was a release that went fairly unnoticed, due to our focus on other things than promotion: family life, indoor gardening, holistic lifestyle and a deep dive into metaphysics.

Malaise (2021)

It wasn’t until 2021 that we found energy to get back up and release our third album — the long anticipated leap of faith into electropop, Malaise. This time we had no intention whatsoever to screw the system back. Two years had passed since Iconoclastic and we looked into our souls for inspiration.

Gothenburg was a wedding song so deep and emotional that the rebel farmer Edward Nordén (think Lysander Spooner in a combined harvester) once posted a video of him blasting it from his tractor into the Nordic summer night. It was also a commemorative track of the city where Lilou first met John, after a few first nudges on a dating site.

Ayn Rand got her own personal track in the title song, breaking free from the surveillance state, a nudge back to 100 Faces. The impact of the album was so hard that the singer-songwriter Hiraeth wrote a review calling it our Magnum Opus, and the late Jeff Winston who founded the non-profit indie hub White Art Collective played many of the songs frequently.

The album encapsulated the deep feelings of sadness, grief, and loss, that originated in the group-think, ignorance, indifference, and sadistic envy we saw wherever we turned. Life is a journey where we leave dead weight behind. Art is ultimately one big me ne frego to expectation.

Like an echo from a distant past of radical turmoil our loyal Danish guy Mazzy wrote: “if the world’s going to Hell in a handbasket, all I’m bringing is my bow, my knife and my Lilou & John t-shirt.” We had descended into the seiðr, and the draugar could fight their pointless battles in the acid waters of Náströnd.

Midnight Oracle (2023)

It took us another two years to release another EP, made up of leftover tracks from Malaise. Never finished, those songs with slight flaws needed new vocal recordings or rework to fit for publishing. The result was Midnight Oracle in 2023, that Joakim Andersen related to Gothic themes and Edgar Allan Poe, and praised the “intelligent lyrics.”

Black Mass descended into the gutter of group-think through the lens of Gustave Le Bon’s The Crowd, and Gomorrah sent a video-game-style hero with a shotgun and a bible into this hell for a rendezvous with the sulfuric manifestation of human ignorance. The song was featured on an anthology by a US amateur video maker who reached out.

Finally we even asked God himself to narrate the end days during a nuclear holocaust in Las Vegas — a song written for Joakim Andersen as a token of gratitude for his many in-depth reviews of our music. It was the reversal of Genesis. God was alone again.

The slurs were becoming more and more infrequent. Guess nobody knew what to call us anymore. The WTFers were reduced to a bare minimum of fans who put up with the constant genre shifts, the dark ambiguity, and the mood swinging vocals. John’s lost faith in humanity and his gradual embrace of Lilou’s complete rejection of wishful thinking added to our already tarnished reputation and scared off the last of the NPCs.

Midnight Oracle marked the end of the introspective years that saw Gospel X, Stray Wolf and Malaise. We had freed ourselves from political polarization and stared into the darkness long enough to actually see the path leading to the other side. It was time for yet another great shift to something new and inspiring. We felt the long-lost surge of creative joy once again. It was time to shine like the sun.

Guerilla Poetry (2024)

After defiance and introspection, we headed straight into the sound we had on the demo recordings before 2016.

Garage Rock In Transition — GRIT — was the genre name we picked for our 2024 album. We had never had any good name for the music we made, Brett Stevens had settled for “nearly indescribable” in a 2018 interview. GRIT was a philosophy that summed up the core: low budget, small-scale, unclean, raw, authentic, intense, poetic. Just a microphone, an electric guitar, a bass guitar, and lots of distortion.

The alternative spelling of “Guerilla” dates back to British 19th century texts. It’s old-fashioned today, but a novelty in its days, and the combination was a good symbol for the album and its creative chaos. We didn’t clean the tracks and we just shut the balcony door when the neighbor mowed the lawn. We recorded each song a maximum of three times and Lilou — probably an incarnation of the original seiðkona who once created Völuspá — avoided reading the lyrics beforehand, to capture the essential emotions of each song and not get stuck in theatrical performance.

We downsized promotion to an absolute minimum as a reboot of the band. It was our ground zero. This was where we would start anew — too old, too white, and too fat to care — too asocial to mingle — and too straightforward to say all the nice things that give popsters airtime. We also decided that the Norway gig should be our final live performance ever. The first had been an open mic at a bar at 8 a.m., well before we released 100 Faces, with a Danish family of four having breakfast as our only audience.

Lilou — the extreme introvert, a “rare sighting” according to locals — had never been eager to play live, and the only reason we ever did the Norway gig was material for a comedy: Lilou had just watched Yes Man, and challenged herself to say yes to everything for the rest of the day. Just a few hours later a kind Norwegian man called Roger sent a mail asking us to play live. She bit her tongue and reluctantly accepted. The Norway gig was therefore a once-in-a-lifetime exception from a life in seclusion, and despite the amazingly welcoming bunch of old-school vikings we befriended, exhaustion took its toll and left us knackered for almost two weeks. Unfortunately, the news about the gig spread and we received more invitations to play. We found that the easiest way out was to ask for a ridiculously high fee.

Such was the setting when we released Guerilla Poetry. The songs stretched out like branches from a lonely old tree that had been struck by lightning and still survived. A fan compared the electric bass with Lemmy and the naked production caused both cheers and a few raised eyebrows. The music — just as life — was the sum of our choices, not a print-ready tabula rasa to color in any standardized pattern.

The album was a catharsis — our expressive vocals and often taboo lyrics could stand on their own without big arrangements. The words were at the forefront and for the first time our small indie duo — who had never been attached to the big supermarket of illusions — found a resting place in the minimalistic chaos. For John, it was a story of breaking free, not from rulers, not from society, but from humanism itself and its assumption that humans are morally superior to any other animal. Lilou had turned him. The metamorphosis was complete.

Black River Butcher (2025)

Humans are corruptible, all religions say, except altruism — the mindset making people hitchhike in Ted Bundy’s car, go home to Jeffrey Dahmer for a drink, and sign petitions to free BTK. Knowledge and experience are the best cures for dying too soon — and experience can be lethal.

We were still eager to push the boundaries for the naked, raw, unpolished sound of GRIT. Inspiration came from Lilou’s extensive interest in deviant psychology and serial killers, Robert Hare’s Without Conscience, as well as the haunting legacy of John’s grandfather who gave name to the album.

After Guerilla Poetry had scared off yet another bunch of easy-listening groupies, we shut down most of our social media accounts in late 2024 to stay away from the zoo. Instead, we diverted our energy toward the one album we had thought about since our debut EP, but never recorded until now: the chilling descent into a world of nihilism and sadism. It was time to release the 16-track album Black River Butcher.

The album scored high on the dark triad, mixing serial killers, pedophiles, rapists, stalkers, black widows, and their victims into a razor-sharp maelstrom of pain. The album was not a metaphorical hell, but an invitation to the listener to explore an asphyxiating survivor story. Our aim was that anyone daring to walk through the album would sense the disturbing eye of a flesh-eater on his soul and watch it consume his body.

Each song therefore destroyed yet another mesmerizing illusion of human morality, adding layers of distortion to replicate the existential nature of murder, and the devastating weight of the trauma cycle. Lilou’s vocals reached new highs and lows of dissonance, terror, and destruction. John’s dirty, messy guitars gave her room to swagger in sadistic frenzy. In 2018, Rosa Traktorn wrote that “the music is intimidating, love it or hate it.” We just pushed it nine circles deeper into the underworld.

Once again, we moved far beyond the utopian ideals of mainstream pop that suffocate our world. Only freaks with jagged spines could possibly endure the badass noise, the distasteful lyrics, and the twisted vocals of our delve into the human psyche in a terrifyingly personal Teufelslied.