Isobel's Debut EP Light weight: Failing Your Friends and Falling in Love [Q&A]


Photo by Gustav Bennich

Upon first listening, nothing about this Swedish group is lightweight; their sound, evasive of genres and easy description, can be quiet one moment, and brash the next. It sows a depth of feelings, pop adjacent, fun and family before quickly veering into surprising composition, all while being fun & cohesive. Wanting to dial in what this band was all about, more on their debut EP, light weight, and more, we sent a few prompts to find out what their anti gravitation goals exactly are: 

OnesToWatch: Who is Isobel?

Isobel: Isobel is a character that I did, from Mike Bartlett’s play Bull.

We are obsessed with your ethereal rock sound, how would you describe it?

thank you<3 If you want to be nice you could describe it as eclectic and dynamic, especially live when we play more songs. The ep itself though has some classic indie throughlines but deviates whenever it can. You get Neil Young and you get harsh noise and you get autotune. We sometimes like to call it strum rock, since it is all downstrokes. You could get away with describing it all as stolen, too.

Are we feeling light weight? On an emotional diet?  

No no put whatever in front of us and we’ll eat that shit up. We want everything always.

Whats the EP about?

Real love, failing your friends, isolation, conversation. It's all pretty eclectic, because debuting is such a silly thing to do.

It can't be that people write their first EP or album chronologically from start to finish?

ours, at least, is glued together by us praying that some lyric or chord change-melody combo is strong enough to hold our combined body weight. We've just been looking for something to stand on, really.

Any collaborators? Who produced the project?

No one wanted to collaborate so we made it all ourselves and produced it ourselves and wrote it ourselves. Then again, we’d rather hear a badly produced song by one band than something produced by a loosely strung together group of people who want to be good. Good aint good in 2025.

 Feeling you have after you listening to this EP should be ‘floating’?

Haha yes exactly, yes.

Besides this excellent EP what else should we be on the lookout for?

We are constantly writing and recording demos so we will release more, but in the meantime it’s in everyone’s interest to see isobel live. We play a lot in Sweden right now and our live shows are pretty cool and fun. In a few weeks we will release a video for The tangible participant which we are super excited about.

What’s inspiring you right now outside of music?

It’s a bit strange being a rock band in 2025. It doesn’t really make sense to just be a band that writes songs in a certain genre and dresses in a certain way anymore. That’s changed in the last like 5 years, we feel like. We live in a culture of calling people out on almost all sorts of group behavior, and if it can’t be disregarded as ironic or at least very self-aware, it’s instantly open to ridicule. We’re no different, an obvious pattern often equals obsoletion. What we think though, or at least hope, is that we’re not just scared of being ridiculed, rather, we see that how everyone perceives contemporary art is changing really fast, and that is very interesting to us. This could be interpreted as if we’re all just more and more acutely attention seeking narcissists who project our fears of being unoriginal onto others, or: we’re all just really thirsty for honest, intelligent and relevant art to actually make us feel something in very numbing times. Anyway, we are very inspired by all people who manage to navigate this without leaning on irony, while being unwaveringly progressive. More specifically Elis Monteverde Burrau and “I love L.A.”.

You all get hungry, where do you go and what do you order?

Filip eats one boiled and one grilled hot dog every day at 16.00 at the kiosk by his studio. I(Isabel) like to eat anywhere where they have small tinned foods. I don’t think John eats. Calle likes crayfish but needs to know what kind he is going to be eating so that he can pair the wine properly. We have literally no idea what Martin likes to eat.

Musically who is new but making all the right moves? Who are your current OnesToWatch?

There's so much great music coming out right now!! You Thant is one of our favourite groups out of Stockholm, but they aren’t really making any moves at all right now. Still, it's enough, since they play the best, most artful shows we’ve ever seen and no move can be more right than that. We also love what Lover’s Skit are doing, and have been harboring a healthy obsession with some of the Copenhagen-based Escho acts, like Fine, Snuggle and Smerz. We recently saw bc,nr perform their latest album too, looooved it.

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