The Millennials entered the Danish music scene this year with the release of their first single ‘The Divide’- a song about the growing distance between humans in the digital age and an invigorating take on guitar driven pop music.
Shaking Love, brings more of this excitement with it’s anthemic quality, banging chorus and reflective verses. It’s a desperate celebration of accepting your own shortcomings and the fact that some things are beyond your control, especially in matters of love.
Shaking Love is out now on We Are Suburban.
In this interview spotlight, I chat with The Millennials about the new release, technology, challenges and more.
Full Q&A along with links and music below.
Where are you from and what style of music do you create? (In your own words, not necessarily in marketing terms or by popular genre classifications.)
The Millennials is an indie-rock group from Copenhagen, Denmark. Our music is energetic but serious, hand-played and totally out of fashion – at least here in Denmark. So we’re pretty excited that our newest single, Shaking Love, is being featured on MTM in far-away USA! Thank you!
We like to think of ourselves as “a voice in a generation”: We write songs that take their departure in our own life experiences as millennials, and usually those experiences amount to something of a contrast to the way our generation is portrayed. It’s not that our lives are so unusual compared to everyone else, but that the narratives about millennials’ lives have been pretty warped, and to a certain extent still are. Narratives like “Millennials feel entitled” or “Millennials are self-absorbed” or the concern that millennials live asocial online lives, are some of the negative narratives that we have a hard time identifying with. On the other hand, there are these idealised perceptions of Millennials too – if you do a quick google search for pictures of Millennials, you’ll find retouched images of groups of shiny-looking, pastel-colour-wearing, young adults who are having an absolute blast while taking selfies or otherwise using their smart-phones to show their perfect-looking lives to the world. This srt of stuff certainly happens in real life too, but the tendency to drown everyone you know in your stories of success is by no means something confined to the millennial cohort – some of our parents are more active on social media than we are! Our hope is that our songs can bring a bit of nuance and contrast into these warped images of our generation – both the idealising and the damning ones.
What led you down this path of music and what motivates you to keep going?
We’ve known each other since we were teen-agers (that’s more than a decade) and have played the Copenhagen underground scene under different band names for just as long – in many ways we taught each other to be musicians. We started because we shared a simple (and ambitious) dream: Living off our music and traveling the world playing it. We haven’t quite fulfilled that dream of fame and fortune yet, but ten years of making music together has taught us a lot about each other personally. We’ve seen each other through personal crisis, through being broke and homeless, through break-ups and make-ups. Making music and telling our stories with it has proven to be an important vehicle for us to move through hard times with. So even though it may be a cliché that the journey is more important than the goal, it totally holds true for us. Over the years, our initial dream of fame and fortune has been overshadowed by a more personal journey with this vehicle called music – it is what keeps us going.
What is your new single about and how did you go about making it?
Shaking Love is a song about how love and doubt aren’t mutually exclusive – and that that’s not a bad thing. Even though doubt may be painful, it helps us to make active decisions to be with our lovers, rather than passively accepting every and any facet of the one that we love, which isn’t always healthy. So what we were aiming at with Shaking Love, was writing a song that celebrates the painful dilemmas, that bouts of doubt in love-relationships pose.
Writing Shaking Love was a bit special for us because it ended up being the result of a team effort. Usually, when we write a song, most of the core melody and chords are already written by Emil (lead singer) or Patrick (bass), and then we arrange those core elements, so they sound good with the whole band. But with Shaking Love it was different. It started with a bass-groove and a bits and pieces of a melody that we were all quite excited about, but didn’t know where to go with. After some frustrating attempts at trying to forge those bits into a fully fledged song, we decided to split up into groups and each write one bit of the song. Some of us wrote the chorus, some of us the verse, and some of us came up with the bridge in the song. When we teamed back up, and showed each other what we had worked on, we were very surprised to see how well the pieces fit together. After that it was just a matter of applying musical glue to each of the pieces, adding a bit of Bruce-Springsteen inspired storytelling and grand sounds, and viola! Shaking Love was born.
Name one or two challenges you face as an indie musician in this oversaturated, digital music age? How has technology helped you (since we know it does help)?
This relates back to the first question, because one of the main challenges we run into in this oversaturated digital age, is the feeling of drowning in what feels like an endless flow of other people’s stories of success. When we engage with social-media as a band, there is often this lingering feeling that we haven’t quite done enough, that other musicians are five steps ahead of us and that the effort we put into making ourselves visible online is somehow already thwarted by the tidal waves of other musicians, competing for a place in the world. But there’s an irony to all of this: If it weren’t for the communication technology, that has become so defining for our generation, we probably wouldn’t be answering these questions in the first place! So the technologies that can make us feel like we’re drowning, are the same ones that make us audible to people, with whom we otherwise never would have been able to connect with. The internet is a particularly important channel for us now, since rock-music in Denmark is facing hard times in terms of gaining local traction.
What was the last song you listened to?
The last song we listened to is “Came to a Stop” by another danish act called Visitor Kane, released the same day as “Shaking Love”. It’s the first single from their up-coming album “Change of Heart”, which we are very much looking forward to hearing the rest of!
Which do you prefer? Vinyl? CDs? MP3s?
We prefer vinyl for the release of a full recording. But we can’t get around using Mp3s and they suit our needs perfectly. Unlike vinyls and CDs you can beam them through cyberspace across any distance in less than the blink of an eye. How cool is that!?
How about this one…. Do you prefer Spotify? Apple Music? Bandcamp? Or something else? Why?
We prefer Soundcloud and Spotify: Spotify for music consumption and Soundcloud for music discovery. We release our music on both of those platforms though.
Where is the best place to connect with you online and discover more music?
Soundcloud, for sure. We are very active there, and the site allows you to actually get in touch with musicians (like us) and music-lovers (like you) around the globe, not just listen to music. If you want get the latest news about us, like concert dates, release dates, and other announcements of import, Facebook is the place to go though. And if you want some more personal, behind the scenes stuff – like pics from shows or studio sessions – we put all of that on Instagram.
