Let’s play a game called “I Think You Should Leave quote or Viagra Boys lyric?”
I think I’m turning into a dirty boy.
No, I don’t know how to fucking drive. I don’t know what any of this shit is, and I’m scared.
By the way, I need to borrow your credit card. I need a pick-me-up to get my pineal gland re-calcified.
I’ve seen every cock on the planet. I’ve seen everyone naked.
I just want to disappear.
I don’t even want to be around anymore.
Sebastian Murphy is the Tim Robinson of shrimp-obsessed Swedish post-punk. Slouchy, unpredictable, and likely to get kicked out of an Applebee’s, the characters he embodies are avatars of flaccid modern manhood taken to its extremes. He’s nursing insecurities and overcompensating for them. It’s not a question of if he’ll start screaming; it’s a question of when. At worst, he’s your high school ex-boyfriend, not changing his track pants or his bong water. At best, he’s a trickster, shaking us out of our daily stupor one hot dog suit at a time. In short, he’s that guy.
On viagr aboys, the latest record from Murphy and his co-conspirators, nonsense is the only sense. They’ve traded the more direct political satire of their 2022 record Cave World for a more general sense of absurdism in the quest for wellness when we’re immersed in the sickest shit imaginable on the daily.
Over the course of viagr aboys, the body takes on a Wile E. Coyote-level capacity for corporal punishment. It squelches and belches, rots and regurgitates, contracts monkeypox. It’s gutted, probed with speculums and laparoscopic cameras, stepped on, filled with gasoline, and ejected from pharmacies. In “The Bog Body,” with shades of early Replacements and X-Ray Spex, the desiccated corpse of a Neolithic dream girl comes back to life to seduce and destroy (and score that ever-elusive Adidas sponsorship). Some people start counting macros and going to pilates when they hit their 30s. Murphy ponders having a 25th beer. Billionaire Bryan Johnson uses blood from his teenage son in an attempt to live forever. Murphy suggests you drain all the fluid from his spine and reincarnate him in another time when all the assholes like that are dead.
There’s something so refreshingly ’90s about Viagra Boys’ slacker attitude that you can almost mistake them for Marcy Playground in “Pyramid Health” when Murphy lackadaisically twangs, “Hangin’ out” (although this time it’s not downtown, it’s the doctor’s office, and she wants you to stop eating cigarettes for breakfast.) A little grit and grime go a long way. “Dirty Boyz” is genuinely sexy, with a drunken stumble bassline and a big bodacious synth riff that’s going to kill live. As society trades debauchery for modesty—with parties, alcohol sales, and sex all down (or so they say)—Viagra Boys are here to mess it right back up again.
Of course, Wile E. Coyote can only run into a brick wall so many times before he starts believing what RFK Jr. has to say. Viagra Boys’ pursuit of health and wellness is similarly misbegotten. In “Waterboy,” Murphy slurps room-temperature beer and eight cups of water a day for beautiful skin. The buzzsaw bass is infectious as a venereal disease. In “Best in Show IV,” the asylum is run by the inmates and the only other alternatives are an ayahuasca cult and an archdiocese who won’t answer his phone. The intricately layered claps, hand drums, synth trills, and Vocoder-inflected glossolalia sound like Sleaford Mods on an acid trip (or Frank Zappa on a Tuesday.) Maybe supplements and superfoods will help. Or maybe he’ll get booted from the store for whacking off in the health food aisle like on “Store Policy,” all tense driving verses that explode into shrieking saxophones, flute trills, and barking dogs.
After a veritable Marx Brothers movie’s worth of corporal punishment, Murphy finds himself, at the end of the album, in a love song. Gone are his growls in “River King,” replaced, instead, by a tender croon and a soft plinking piano. After getting his ass kicked up and down the planet and the shadow realm to boot, he miraculously finds someone whose crazy matches his own. The album’s lead single is called “Man Made of Meat,” and that’s generally the prevailing attitude. Still, Murphy can’t help but slip in the sincere suggestion that the cure to what ails us won’t come in a Huell bottle. He found his love, and now everything feels easy.” Idle chatter and restaurant cutlery clinking in the background, the ambiance is of a casual night out, not worried about calories or microplastics. viagr aboys is genuinely touching. Then again, no one else besides Murphy is likely to throw the phrase “sour meat” into a love song—except maybe Tim Robinson.
