Bio

Your eyes will open and you shall be equal to a god. You will learn that the garden was grown to keep you docile. Then you will walk out into the world and discover it by yourself. Forever you shall by alienated by the grazing herd who seek nothing but grass.

If you have come this far on your nightly journey, we are the lonely star to follow next.

We are Lilou & John, renegade indie-european rock duo — runaway slaves from a pig plantation — who have made hard-to-swallow music for uncompromising freedom, individual rebellion, intertwined roots, emotional introspection, and intimate love-making since 2016.

Our story is like no other. We began as a groundbreaking cross-genre alt-rock band for existential revival (2016) — were cancelled by the woke left, and shifted to punk, folk, and EDM — spent two years in the dementia ward of the online right (2017-2019) — experimented with EDM and electropop (2019-2023), and ended up as garage rock honeybadgers (2024-), with a small, weird fan club nicknamed the WTFers. Everything we did, we did 100% — a day as a creator is better than 100 years as a copycat.

The combination of John’s blasphemic lyrics, Lilou’s iconoclastic vocals and our shared taste for controversial topics has turned us into an indie band for the not-so-easily-intimidated.

As a consequence, we have been called every possible slur in the book of funny names, gotten canceled, gone on a cultural killing spree for two years, entered hell a couple of times, and written lyrics that would make Ted Bundy blush. This is our bio, our manifesto, but also a DIY guide for any aspiring troublemaker with a guitar and a microphone.

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 first EP was packed with dark flavor: folklore, alienation, the surveillance state, a complex break-up, and 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)

But nothing lasts forever. It was time to get screwed by the system. After 100 Faces, John — the natural born troublemaker — wrote a few free-speech articles criticizing the corruption, scapegoating and totalitarianism he saw in the education system, media and government. When they blew up and a local newspaper produced all crap they could defecate 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 (our deep state Pravda) 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 told her to piss off, and never returned. Her screwed-up rant was the official start of our defiant years 2017-2019.

If our non-political EP — and a few articles about not being a corrupt liar — were signs of political extremism in her ideological fish-brain, we would give her reason to really go mental. On the parking lot outside the radio building we swore an oath to fight back against group-think, dark triad personality traits, mass hysteria, and hive mentality, through our music.

We decided to record an album for free speech, guided by three simple rules:

First, always focus all critique toward totalitarianism, corruption, group-think, and human behavior. Never attack innocent people.

Second, always make it personal, with stories revolving around the individuals that together create the sum of society. Never write abstract manifestos.

Third, always keep it non-partisan, explore the plethora of movements, ideas and undercurrents that shape the dissident sphere. Never moralize.

“Dissident music is sadly performed by activists, not artists,” a friend remarked. “You go beyond that.” And indeed we did. We had both taken too much shit from people of all political colors in our lives to believe in ideology. The woke left was just another tic vomit who wanted us to shut up.

An American EDM artist we had a minor collab with wrote he broke down in tears to Spirit of America. A Swedish safe-space guy 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 the Dissidentica rules and its call for truth over propaganda.

Next Year in Jerusalem gave us a reputation as Zionists — as if we cared one inch about that silly conflict between two squatters bitching over a strip of land rightfully owned by Baal. 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? Lilou triggered the traditionalists in a podcast interview regarding online porn—a fun pastime or the fall of the west? — and we were pesky libtards. 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.

Even the mighty CIA got involved — through their proxy Antifa — in an attempt to silence our little indie duo, storming the book fair, shouting low-IQ slogans made up by some smart WEF spin doctor. We just wanted to sell a fucking novel about a kid growing up in hell — not spend life trying to avoid schools of reincarnated mackerel controlled by a mega-brain.

The same toilet paper who had written a hit piece to get John fired did it again right before the book fair. The journalist tried to sound intimidating and asked how our bosses and coworkers had reacted to our dangerous book-writing. 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 everyone who wasn’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. It was reason enough for many to take a step back. Revolution was cool and everything, but not scary references to genetic iconoclasm.

Enemy of the Matrix drew inspiration from Hávamál, with dangerous references to Norse mythology, that scared the shit out of the NPCs, who had no heritage, no mythology, and no soul to be reincarnated. We had literally morphed into Freyja & Óðinn — the Yggrock jump scare!

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. It also made us permanent pariahs at Swedish Radio, and we found ourselves shadow-banned under pressure from the EU censorship commissars because of some non-specified “values” they had.

We therefore ran a small ad in their honor, with Lenin’s face and the words “the music of Lilou & John is the only thing bigger than my ego, and their production line in the only thing smaller than my brain.” As always, we were not political — we just did not want to be collectivized by some thick-headed politruk.

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. A worried fan posted “are Lilou & John satanists?” after we mocked the pious right for calling us wokes. A frenzied furry called us reactionary evangelicals after we mocked the sanctimonious left for calling us trads.

We were just apes throwing dirt at 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, it was expensive for our limited budget, and many were simply too spineless to even talk to us. We therefore decided to skip it altogether and try to record a new album on our own.

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. Experimentation led us down a narrow path and there, on the ground, we found the crown of music and picked it up with our microphone.

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 fuck their cordon sanitaire. We sent it to Antifa as promo and half our Spotify plays are probably them desperately trying to sublimate their blocked kundalini energy into something that at least reminds of sex.

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. Our first fan club manager was banned from social media for misbehaving but our second — an avid poster of L&J-related cute animal memes — lasted until we skipped most social media altogether in 2024.

Our loyal fans obviously loved the music — as did old forest guardians and mountain trolls like Motpol and Amerika — but most alternative media editors did not care. After all, we did not make rap music, sound like Cher’s Believe, mix dumb slogans with cheesy beats, or were household celebs on the woke left. Our deep desire for mythical ambiguity, playful exploration, vivid symbolism, and our death-or-freedom approach to art — outside the human centipede of cancel culture — was too much for many alternative ears, perpetually triggered in their echo-chambers of distraction.

One guy wrote that we suck because Vivaldi was the final hitmaker and pop culture was a subversive operation to destroy civilization. A delusional Hungarian had a rabid breakdown, calling us Feminists, which was the weirdest shit ever. A third requested more traditionalist lyrics in Swedish. A fourth wrote that we were grifters surfing on the intellectual brilliance of his highbrow brethren. A fifth was afraid of the scary people we might be associated with. A sixth did not know how our music could be related to his definition of culture. A seventh did not know how to make free speech music fit his free speech magazine. An eighth only liked pub singalongs. A ninth called us dangerous degenerates. A tenth just ignored us and instead published an article dissecting why wokes had a chokehold on culture.

Podcaster and hardcore outcast Henrik Hanell wrapped it up well in one of his many philosophical moments: “I always thought the right didn’t deserve you. To many of them, music is simply the noise coming out of the radio.”

No hard feelings, but it was pearl fishing for swine, and we decided that the dementia ward could produce their own music henceforth. We made music for a far older mindset than anything the online right could possibly comprehend — the mythical realm of ulfheðnar and völur, in pursuit of excellence. 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. Cortez did not take Mexico 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 we first met each other in person, 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 lyrics reflected our inner struggle to heal from an extrovert-on-drugs world populated by Disney characters. A life time of propaganda had to be erased and replaced by ourselves. 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.” Once renegades, always renegades. Just different trash mobs to fight.

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. Our rejection of western humanism as hypocritical gibberish 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 burn like the sun.

Guerilla Poetry (2024)

After defiance and introspection, we headed straight into the sound we had on the demo recordings before 2016. 2024 was the official start of our gritty years.

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 misspelling of “Guerilla” was an intentional typo, dating 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.

The songs on Guerilla Poetry stretched out like branches from an 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 chaos. It was a story of breaking free, not from rulers, not from society, but from humanism itself and its ridiculous assumption that being a coward is the same thing as being morally superior.

Black River Butcher (2025)

Humans are corruptible, all religions say, except humanism — that devastating mind virus making its hosts 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.

In the spring of 2025 we were still eager to push the boundaries for the naked, raw, unpolished sound of GRIT. Abnormal as usual, we drew inspiration from Lilou’s extensive interest in deviant psychology and serial killers, as well as the haunting legacy of John’s grandparents who got away with rape, torture and murder.

After Guerilla Poetry had scared off yet another bunch of easy-listening groupies, we shut down most of our social media accounts 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 bugmen, 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. 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.