NUGGETS - About To Explode ! (Hard-Core - Interview with Jocke)

Please introduce yourself and let me know how it all began with the band ?
I’m Jocke, I’m the vocalist of Nuggets. We’re a hardcore band from Gothenburg, Sweden. Nuggets consists of me, Oscar (guitar), Victor (bass) and Björn (drums). We’ve all played together in other bands earlier, both hardcore and non-hardcore bands. We formed Nuggets in 2022 because we missed the genre! Also, I’d had a dream of forming a cannabis positive hardcore band for ten plus years and everybody was aboard that idea so here we are.

Describe your sound and explain why I should listen to YOUR band at all cost ?
We play straight forward no frills hardcore. Not too fast, not too slow. Solid hooks. Dare I say we are the world's best cannabis positive hardcore band ? Because we are, and everyone should listen to us.

Lyrical and musical inspirations/influences ? How important are the lyrics for you ? Are there any specific messages or thoughts you try to develop and share through your lyrics ?
The musical influences are really hard to pin down. I think we all have pretty different taste when it comes to music and hardcore. When we formed the band some of us talked about Ten Yard Fight a lot and about Terror, but we don’t sound like either of them. When we were working on our new EP, we were all in agreement that Fuck a Proud Boy by Kind Eyes is one of the best recent hardcore songs. Again, I wouldn’t say that was necessarily an inspiration but rather some common ground.
Regarding lyrics, I like them stupid. That being said, I don’t think that necessarily makes the lyrics unimportant, I think you walk a fine line when writing stupid lyrics. You have to ask yourself how much you can repeat yourself, how can you build a song around just phrasing and rhymes and how do you keep from getting too repetitive when basically every song has the same theme, or lack thereof. I can’t really say if that shines through, but while working on our new EP I listened to a lot of City Morgue.

About your latest release ?
We just released our new EP "Mental Health Poster Boys" ! Four stupid tracks about smoking and urging people to cease with the yapping. We’ve been working on the songs during the fall and winter of 2023, and we recorded them this spring. It’s our second release. Our first release was a 13-track album called Inner Peace which contained the first songs we ever wrote together as a band. I’m not saying that the songs on Inner Peace don’t work together, but on "Mental Health Poster Boys" I feel that we really found our lane.
It was recorded by Gustaf Uicic at Harder Recordings who did a great job. He also recorded Inner Peace and this time we went in with a different mindset. I think our mindset last time was along the lines of “we’re seasoned musicians, we can record an entire album in a weekend, no problems” and of course that didn’t work out. This time our mindset was closer to “we hope we can record four songs in a weekend, but we’re prepared to fail miserably” and everything worked out. We also had a clearer view of the sound we wanted to achieve, and it came together really well.
Our friend Bobby, who me, Victor, and Björn used to play together with in Tramwreck, puts down some great vocals on one of the songs, and it’s always fun to bring in friends to bless your shit.
Victor did the artwork for the EP. He has done all our artwork, merch and so on and is becoming something of a little local powerhouse when it comes to graffiti style artwork for hardcore bands, zines and gig posters.
At the moment, "Mental Health Poster Boys" is only available digitally, on Spotify and Bandcamp. We’d love to have a physical release as well and we’re doing the rounds now, e-mailing labels that we hope might be interested. However, we were too eager to wait for that and we just wanted to get the songs out.

Future plans?
We’re hopefully going to play a couple of gigs during the fall, and hopefully get to stretch our legs outside of Gothenburg. And we’re going to write a couple of new songs and record and release them as fast as we can, so we can keep our output high.

Your most insane dream with the band would be ?
Difficult question. If we’re talking about an insane dream along the lines of something that is never going to happen, it would be interesting to sell out completely. Like, if a major record label wants to sign us and pay us huge advances and stuff like that but also wants to tweak our sound and image and wants us to dress and act differently. Obviously, I would want us to take the deal and it would be interesting to work under circumstances like that. I’m pretty sure we would crash and burn, but what a way to go!

Your BEST & WORST concert - as a band - and why ?
We’ve only played two gigs so far, so this is a pretty easy question. If we only look to our own performances our first gig was the best one. We played our debut album Inner Peace back-to-back, and we were well-rehearsed. By default, this means our second gig was our worst gig. It wasn’t a disaster or anything, but we had that classic second gig hubris where we didn’t think we needed to rehearse as much as we probably did. It went alright, but we could have been a little tighter.

Next live-appearance(s) ?
This summer we’re playing at the Fragile Mountain Festival. It’s a punk festival in Gothenburg and it’s the third time it’s being put up. They usually book tons of bands, and the focus is predominantly d-beat and raw punk and stuff like that, but us and a couple of other bands will bring the hardcore.

Some words on your local scene - bands you're friends with and you'd like to name ?
The Gothenburg scene is really strong at the moment. Tons of good bands. Check out Bulls Shitt, Sidestep and Outstand, and all the others as well.

Last word is yours..
Smoke something, bitch !

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Credits :
Band photo by Björn Wallin.
Live photos by Andreas Ljungman.