Girl Scout is Taking Things to the Next Level

The Swedish indie punk band released their debut Album Brink on March 20, opening the door to bigger shows and a first official Europe and UK headline tour

PHOTO BY JAKOB EKVALL

The jazz musician-to-punk-rocker pipeline is more common than one might expect. In fact, that very pipeline is responsible for the creation of Stockholm-based act, Girl Scout.

This three-piece consists of lead vocalist/guitarist Emma Jansson, drummer Per Lindberg and guitarist/bassist Kevin Hamrig. They met while in school at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm; Jansson and Lindberg were jazz students, while Hamrig studied music production. 

Girl Scout was a bit of an accident, according to Janson, and was also initially a jazz duo she formed with a classmate as a side hustle for extra money. Eventually, two other members came onboard and the group began writing original songs. They weren’t a “serious project,” she said, until the COVID-19 pandemic, when the trio lost a member and solidified, bonding over a shared love for garage rock and Britpop, as well as a desire to transition from jazz performances to more rock-forward sounds. 

Four years later, the band has leaned into its identity as “a pure rock band,” Lindberg said, but they haven't stopped craving experimentation. After three swiftly executed EPs, they wanted to deepen the process and extend the timeline to deliver their debut album, Brink. The result was a self-released, 13-track record filled with contemplation, contradiction and all of the ruminating thoughts the band members had during its creation. 

The album plays out cyclically, with the beginning track, “Intro,” setting the melodic framework for what will eventually return in the final track, aptly named “Outro.” What comes in between is a lyrical whirlwind of mixed emotions, but the intro is a starting point, or as Lindberg put it, “a world you can just sit in for a while" and, after experiencing the album, come home to its closing.

“It felt really good to come back to that melody after the album… a nice, soft, sweet foundation you could be lulled into,” he said. “And it was also nice to have that as a way to tie everything together.”

Subsequent tracks depart from the dreamy, aimless start, launching into bittersweet, powerhouse indie rock anthems like “Same Kids,” “Crumbs,” “Dead Dog” and “Operator.”

Others like “Uh-Huh,” “Ugly Things” and “Keeper” bring a touch of softness to the mix and, according to the band, pushed them beyond their traditional way of making things like “just a band in a room” would do.

Writing “Keeper” was “very far from what you would imagine a band doing,” Jansson said. It was formed after repeated guitar loops and experimentation with different parts. 

"We didn't limit ourselves to thinking that since we're a band, everything needs to exist in that sort of world… we were very open-minded with each song taking whatever direction we felt was exciting and interesting,” she said.

Earlier EPs felt rushed, she added. The band would book a week in the studio, get a proper recording and be done. But for Brink, they spend roughly six months in the recording studio for two or three days at a time. 

“We would lay the groundwork, and then we could kind of sit with it for a bit… we were recording something and then going back, starting over and giving it a lot more thought,” Jansson said. “It feels like we finally allowed ourselves to give everything the time that it needed.”

The album crescendos and returns to calm over again, exploring swirling moods, confusion and, ultimately, identity. Some songs came quicker than others — the band recalled that “Simple Life” felt complete after the first time they played it in rehearsal. The repetitive self-help mantra came to serve as the album’s thesis, Lindberg said, encompassing the emotional spectrum spread throughout the 13 tracks. 

“There’s a lot of lightheartedness and humor behind [‘Simple Life’], but there’s also inner conflict or actual issues that lie underneath,” Jansson, who wrote the song, said. “A lot of the other songs pivot between those two feelings, but ‘Simple Life’ is a song that sits clearly in the middle of them.”

Through playful lyrics secretly riddled with inner turmoil, Brink drops its listener into a lush somatic landscape, takes them for a spin and spits them out back at the beginning, where the same feelings of uncertainty and nonchalance meet again. The album raises questions about the future and how it might pan out but, in the end, leaves those questions unanswered — because no real answer yet exists. 

As Girl Scout now embarks on a major headlining tour of the U.K. and Europe, they’re bringing their signature indie charm to bigger stages and playing longer sets. As for a U.S. leg of the tour, things are still in the works, they said, but it’s not out of the question for 2027. For now, they’re focused on experimenting onstage, applying the same deliberation that went into making the album.

“We’ve really been working on the album for ourselves,” Hamrig said. “And I’m excited to get out there again to play it. There are way more possibilities for how we can build a set now that we have more songs out there.”

Brink debuted on March 20 as a self-released project, and Girl Scout is now on tour until May 24 in Europe and the U.K.