“The first time I put ‘freedom’ into a search engine was around the time of the 2016 US election,” recalls Magne Monroe, frontman and songwriter with up-and-coming Swedish heartland rockers Freedom. “I got so many pictures of Trump it almost put me off.”
So why choose such a profoundly un-Googleable name?
“It looks good on a T-shirt,” he reasons. “I just wanted something short that would work well on merchandise.”
Listening to Freedom’s raw but big-hearted second album Stay Free!, you suspect it won’t be long before we start to see a proliferation of Freedom merch. The band describe themselves as ‘working-class rock for the twenty-first century’. A friend, Hellacopters frontman Nicke Andersson, came up with a more pithy epithet, dubbing them ‘bargain-basement Springsteen’.
“I haven’t spoken to him about that but I guess it’s a compliment,” says Magne. “His take on it is that you’ll find the good stuff in any genre in the bargain bin, all the deep cuts and the quality material.”
Certainly, Magne is a Boss fan. “The inspiration I guess comes from the energy in his music. Our style is a bit more on the rock side, but it still has that uplifting part. I really like that seventies horny upbeat rock side of Springsteen."
Freedom came together during the covid years, as Magne filled his enforced downtime with songwriting. Their self-titled debut was recorded in just three days in 2021. Although Stay Free! took a little bit longer, Freedom are a businesslike band.
“When you rehearse as much as we do, the process is pretty fast,” he explains. “You’re not really working in the studio, you just go in there and take a snapshot. If you’ve done all your preparation, it’s pretty fast.”
In common with Springsteen, he draws much of his inspiration from everyday life, whether that’s Johnny You’re Electric off the new album, a tender portrait of a fallen friend who lived for rock’n’roll, or recent single Tonight, a candid look at band life, which has the killer couplet: ‘Some people they get houses and some get a degree, and some people sleep on couches on a floor in Germany.’ Too much information, surely?
“That’s still part of my life and a lot of my musician friends’ [lives] too,” he says with a laugh. “You get to that point in your early thirties when you start looking at what other people around you are doing. What am I doing? Well, I have a show booked and I’m sleeping on a couch. You’re kind of questioning: ‘Is this the right thing to do, or am I just wasting my time?’
"I think everyone doing music has those kinds of doubts every now and then. But hopefully with this album we can move off the couches and start getting some nicer hotels."
Stay Free! is out now via Wild Kingdom.
