When discussing the future of indie rock, the name you can be guaranteed to hear is Tribe Friday. Tribe Friday is an up-and-coming Swedish indie rock band that you should stream immediately. At the end of their winter tour, Sheesh Magazine chatted with the Tribe Friday trio: Noah Deutschmann and Isak Gunnarsson play guitar and vocals, and Robin Hanberger Pérez slays bass and vocals. Keep reading to discover the inspiration, influences and behind-the-scenes of their music creation.
1. You guys were on tour recently, how was it?
TRIBE FRIDAY: Yeah, we toured all throughout September, October and November. Luckily after our last show, we sort of got some time to unwind. It was wild, especially cause we had our biggest growth spurt during the pandemic, and so before 2020 we were playing local shows for like 20 or 30 people who were mostly friends or random people who were interested in music. Whereas recently people came to the shows and they knew the songs, so that’s really cool. We also saw some people with Tribe Friday tattoos, which is wild. You know, I have tattoos of my favourite bands so it makes me feel sort of warm and fuzzy inside.
2. What made you want to form an indie rock band?
TRIBE FRIDAY: I formed the band originally way back in 2016, and I was sort of an alt kid living in a very small Swedish town, with around 20,000 people. And basically the options you had in terms of actually doing something with your life was playing sports, playing music, or doing drugs. So I guess it was just small town boredom, you know I wanted to have something to do after school.
3. Has music always been a big element in your life?
TRIBE FRIDAY: Yeah, music has definitely always been a big part of my lifestyle and my family, so building the band was sort of a natural progression. I actually started out playing in bands, singing for my older brothers bands, so it’s always been a part of who I am. I usually compare it to how cooking brings a lot of families together; music brings my family together. This weekend, I was just up north having a family get together, and it was me and my cousins jamming and singing songs, so yeah it’s definitely always been a part of my identity.
4. Who came up with the name Tribe Friday and why?
TRIBE FRIDAY: It was actually just a band name generator. Over the years I’ve been trying to come up with a good explanation or an excuse for the band name, but to be honest I couldn’t think of anything.
5. Were there any specific influences or inspirations for your debut single Gothenburg?
TRIBE FRIDAY: Since I was so young, like 15 or 16, all of those early songs like Gothenburg were me experimenting and trying to find the sound I was comfortable with. So I sometimes have trouble seeing it as the proper Tribe Friday debut because for me it was something I wrote as an angsty teen. But the inspiration behind that song in particular was because I was young, experimenting with music and going around doing small shows and I ended up having this huge crush on this guy who was the lead singer of another band from Gothenburg. So I wrote that song because I was sort of madly in love with this guy, even though I barely knew him. He then ended up being straight, so it didn’t really work out anyway. But then also being about Gothenburg, a city which holds a lot of musical history, I was trying to pull from that, and in particular Gothenburg has a strange upbeat, dance, indie music scene that has grown really popular from there and up into the rest of Sweden, so I think that was the inspiration behind the sound of Gothenburg.
6. What is the creative process behind your music?
TRIBE FRIDAY: It’s very different, it really depends. We have a broad spectrum of influences throughout the few members of the band, so for some of the songs we’ll get together in the rehearsal space and we just jam out something and we’ll find a riff that we all like and just build from there. After laying down some groundwork we’ll brainstorm and think about what the song sounds like in terms of lyrical themes and stuff like that. Whereas other songs, like drugs x boys x drugs and forward is the way out, those songs are a lot more just me in my bedroom with my computer laying out all the tracks and doing it myself, so it definitely depends. We really do take inspiration from absolutely everything, which is pretty obvious on the record we’re putting out this spring, because we listen to everything and we just want to make the music that we want to make.
7. Your music videos are very laid back and connected with your fans, is there a particular creative process behind your music videos?
TRIBE FRIDAY: Even though we have some partners we work with for our music videos, we’re still very much a DIY band. So for most of those music videos, we make them ourselves, and obviously we can have all sorts of crazy concepts in mind, but maybe we don’t have the technical abilities to make it huge and super high production value, but yeah I’m glad they translate to nice and laid back.
8. What is your favourite song you’ve made and why?
TRIBE FRIDAY: That’s a hard one. It sort of depends, like some days I can’t listen to anything I’ve written because it all sounds terrible, and some days I think I’m the best songwriter in the world. I think my favourite one would probably be forward is the way out. It sort of feels very honest to how I was feeling while I was writing it, sort of disconnected from people and sad, and I think I managed to capture it in a way that I’m proud of. For the creative process behind this one, it was very much just me alone in the studio with a drum machine and a guitar, and that was it.
9. Would you guys be interested in doing collaborations with other artists in the future, and if so who would be your dream artist to collab with?
TRIBE FRIDAY: Yeah of course we would, we’ve actually been talking about that a lot and I’ve been doing some collab sessions with different song writers and whatnot. Nothing has come to fruition quite yet, but yes we would definitely be open to that. In terms of dream collab, I don’t know if I can speak for the rest of the band, but I think getting a feature from Gerard Way would probably be the ultimate life goal. I heard he’s coming to Sweden this summer so I’m trying to make it work.
10. You have an album coming out soon, if you could describe it in three words, what would they be?
TRIBE FRIDAY: Really, really good. The album is called bubblegum emo, and we’re obviously very proud of it. It’s been in progress for a long time and I feel like the main difference between this album and the previous projects are that we really set out to make an album, as opposed to before where we’d write a song every now and then and try to piece it together into some sort of a cohesive project. With this one we had album sessions for a few weeks and then we went into the studio and I was working on a production for this record for over a year and so it’s sort of grown more and more crazy over the year and it’s also something you can hear when you’re listening to it. We’re very proud of it, we’ve taken a lot more care in terms of the songwriting, production, and the instrumentation and everything, so I’m really really excited to release it.
Presave the first single off Tribe Friday’s upcoming album here.
To prep for the new album, make sure to stream all of Tribe Friday’s released tunes on Spotify and Apple Music. And keep up with the band on Instagram and TikTok.
