Pumpegris are on the rise

That word? Pumpegris.

Don’t worry if you aren’t familiar with it – even the majority of Norwegians aren’t. Most will ask, “What the fuck does that mean?” as guitarist Astrid Garmo tells me. But Sonne is half Danish and grew up with the surrealist poems of Halfdan Rasmussen. “He wrote a sweet little poem about a pig that can pump anything,” she explains, referring to the Danish writer’s work Pumpegris og andre børnerim. In English: pumping pig.

“This kid finds this pig that pumps whatever he wants out of its nose, and asks for soda, like, ‘Please pump three-million liters of soda,’” Sonne continues. “Then he wants some more. ‘No,’ the pig says. ‘I am all empty now.’ And the kid says, ‘Oh shucks, I should have made alcohol! I should have made booze!’”

Sonne explains that Scandinavia's folk-adjacent acts tend to adopt names associated with nature or animals – “some kind of bird or the wind or the cliffs” – but she didn’t want to take things so seriously, an intention that had to start with the first thing anyone learns about you: your name. “It’s really such a musical playground for us,” she says, “so it’s great, I realise, to have a name that implies fun or playfulness.”

You’ll see those characteristics in the uneventful, fly-on-the-wall video Pumpegris put together for “Føkk det”, the lead single from their recently released debut album, Fritids, meaning ‘leisure time.’ The camera follows the band as they shoot the shit and drink booze (from bottles, not pigs), moving from cramped apartment to park to bar. Not much – not anything – happens, but the video remains faithful to the song’s origins: that pandemic-era “we-have-no-place-to-be” hangout time. And hey, perhaps Sonne sees something of herself in that alcohol-craving child from Rasmussen’s poem.

“Remembering those times when I was younger, hanging out with friends, we weren’t young enough to drink someplace, so we would drink in the backyard of the school or just wander around drinking,” Sonne explains. “So [“Føkk det” has] this wandering, disillusioned vibe.” Darker stuff underpins the song, too: it borrows a traditional hardanger fiddle tune (Norway’s national instrument) that is supposed to put you in a trance-like state, as Garmo notes. “The devil puts you in this dancing mood and you can’t stop,” Sonne adds. Though, perhaps anticipating problems with that, they transposed it into a different tuning, as fiddle player Trygve Liahagen clarifies.

The founder of Pumpegris, Sonne calls herself the captain of a “very secure ship.” But the band – whose members met at the Norwegian Academy of Music in Oslo – has become democratic and driven by each person’s different skills and interests. “I guess it started with me finding these incredible musicians and friends that wanted to build this idea I had about a folk music-based band with a more groovy, loose, and funky direction,” Sonne explains.

Indeed, the band plays around with dozens of ingredients under their broad ‘folk-fusion’ moniker: religious psalms and traditional folk tunes. Uplifting, falsetto harmonies. Sexy grooves one minute, thrashing drums the next. Noisy, punky sections, and Mikkel Bjørneboe’s always-acrobatic bass chops. Garmo, the lead guitarist, meanwhile, is an unlikely shoegaze stan, listing off upcoming gigs – Ride, Slowdive – while name-dropping contemporary American acts working in the genre, such as Trauma Ray and They Are Gutting a Body of Water. Garmo was the last member to join, meaning, for the most part, the band constructed their music without a chord instrument – arguably the reverse of conventional pop songwriting – instead relying on bass and fiddle. “That’s the shape of the tunes,” Liahagen says. Garmo’s parts, therefore, are not foundational but they colour everything in, utilising fuzz, reverb, and “sound-walls” – “weird shit” – that sit atop everything.

West African music is another reference point: the swaggering, infectious dance of “Livet kan jokke suge” and its plinky, kalimba-esque, marimba-esque countermelodies evidence this. Sonne and Garmo point to the last song on the album, “Kjære bror”, as a full-fledged experiment in West African composition. “I don’t know that it’s so apparent, but it’s definitely in there. Then when it mixes with all the other juices, it gets to a good place that’s not too referential,” Sonne says.

Meanwhile, “Forfengelighet” – this writer’s favourite – begins with a dark and mysterious plucked fiddle as Sonne delivers hushed, rushed spoken-word lines, almost like a rap. Paranoia sets in and you check over your shoulder, Sonne’s words tumbling over one another, but then the arrangement unleashes the light: it surges into a euphoric major key section with two fiddles and guitar playing the same twirling melody in octaves, sounding like you’ve reached the summit of a mountain. Liahagen notes how the effect ends up sounding a bit like a saxophone, blending together in this “really nice and strange way.”

“I don’t feel like a rapper, but [I wanted to make something] more spoken-word/rap-inspired,” Sonne says of “Forfengelighet”, evidencing her curiosity for new approaches to composition, something that lies at the heart of Pumpegris. “I had an awakening. I was never into hip-hop or rap as a younger person, and as I discovered the joy of writing lyrics, rap is really close to that joy, because it’s word- and rhythmic-centered. So pairing that with the focus on the rhythm in dance-tune playing – traditional playing – was a huge link for me, because they have the same goal: this joy of rhythm.”

I love how the band easily extracts joy from complex songcraft – something you might think was all about rules and stony faced virtuosity. They are highly trained and skilled, sure, but also make a point of having as much fun as possible – hence naming their album in honour of leisure time.

Pumpegris’ broader ambitions naturally fall into place around this. Yes, it would be nice if being in a band kept their bank accounts topped up, but they’re in it for the music: “We’re still trying to just make good music and have a good time, explore all the parts of the band that we haven’t found yet,” Sonne says. “It feels like the beginning, and we’re super stoked that people are finding us and enjoying it.”