By Jenell Taylor, Columns and Features Editor

[Club 8; 2025]

Key Tracks: “Sneaky Feelings,” “Your Modern Heart,” “Let It All Fly”

Rating: 7/10

Club 8 is a Swedish indie pop duo made of Karolina Komstedt and Johan Angergård. Since their formation in 1995, the duo has been incorporating jazz and twee elements into their music creating a twinkling, effervescent sound that is as sweet as sugar. Their latest release is an album titled Seasonal Echoes, which arrives just in time for autumn to swirl into the winter months. 

In a bright flash, the album opens with “Stay Together,” a sunny track about quiet defiance. Komstedt sings in her breathy drawl, “you can’t tell us how to live our lives / I know it won’t fly.” This track is composed of beachy guitar riffs, chimes and twinkles that cue listeners in on the secret to Club 8’s cheery attitude: positive disinterest. The repetition of “I can no longer be bothered” is a direct message to listeners to let the little things go in order to feel lighter in your heart. 

Track 2 takes us back in time to 1986, with a reference to a staple band for melancholics, The Smiths. Komstedt references her internal landscape, singing “Learning to fly / Feel I was born the wrong time / The girl with the thorn in her side.” “Born The Wrong Time” is a love letter to adolescence and the desire to live a life that couldn’t be more different from your own. Accompanied by instrumentals that feel like a sparkling ocean wave, this track speaks to those who may be feeling disjointed or out of place. Komstedt puts those feelings to rest, singing that they are “swept away in the tide” and you can finally breathe again. 

Following the 80s theme, track 4, “ooo” has qualities resembling The Cure, fully equipped with dreamy guitar riffs and racing synths. Komstedt has a voice that is straight out of an enchanted forest, with fog covering the ground, woodland creatures acting as spirit guides, and just a bit of pixie dust hanging in the air. She sings, “getting healed by all that shines / Living in a haze / Shining violence everywhere,” enamoured with nostalgia and hope for the future. 

At just 22 minutes, Seasonal Echoes is a bite-sized happy pill intent on urging listeners to release heavy feelings from their hearts and watch them blow away in the wind. Club 8 is quintessential to the indie music scene, and their contributions have only expanded with the release of this vibrant record. Seasonal Echoes is everything cheery and sweet, and holds the confidence that it can carry listeners tenderly through the harsh winter ahead and into spring’s familiar embrace.