The Hives wanted their new album to be “stupid and childish”.
The Swedish band are back with their first new music in 11 years and they have declared they didn’t want their comeback album ‘The Death Of Randy Fitzsimmons’ to be full of dreary “adult rock” – with frontman Pelle Almqvist insisting he didn’t want them to sound like they have “matured”.
He told NME: Imagine: ‘The Hives have been away from 10 years and now they’ve matured’. It was important to go the opposite way.
“This has to be f****** stupid and childish, even worse than we’ve been before! The punk songs on this album are almost worse than our first record. ‘The Bomb’ and ‘Trapdoor Solution’ are almost like us reaching the ceiling of it.
“What Did I Ever Do To You’ was almost born out of the frustration of not making a Hives album.”
Guitarist Niklas Almqvist added: “[The album is] fast-paced, energetic, rock’n’roll and punk. It’s a good feeling, and from having been away for so long, it was what we ended up doing from sheer excitement. You want to come back with a bang, you don’t want to come back with ‘adult rock’.”
The follow-up to 2012’s ‘Lex Hives’ is set for release on August 11. The title ‘The Death Of Randy Fitzsimmons’ is a reference to Niklas Almqvist’ fictitious alter-ego who they claimed was responsible for writing their songs and managing the group.
They said in a press release: “As the album’s macabre title hints, the band’s extended absence from the studio has been no hiatus but rather a horror story. “The Hives now admit they have not seen nor spoken to their founder, mentor and songwriter, the perpetual limelight-shunning Randy Fitzsimmons, since the release of 2012’s ‘Lex Hives’. Following the recent discovery of a hidden away obituary and cryptic poem in the local paper of the Northern Vastmanland town where The Hives are from, the band members were led to Fitzsimmons’ tombstone. “Upon digging the freshly interred ground, the band found not a body but instead several tapes, suits, and a piece of paper bearing the words ‘The Death Of Randy Fitzsimmons’.”