Album Review: Smag På Dig Selv - This Is Why We Lost (Stunt Records)

The second record from Smag På Dig Selv blasts off from a very particular Copenhagen lineage. The trio emerged from Freetown Christiania in 2018. Their 2020 EP, Dunkelkraft, was released through Freetown Sound Division. Built from Christiania live and studio recordings, their 2024 debut SPDS then earned a Danish Music Award for New Live Act through the Roskilde Rising circuit. This Is Why We Lost keeps the velocity, but twists it through a more deliberate handling of its atmosphere. Across 33 minutes, SPDS pontificates on the nature of defeat, something culture teaches itself through the flattening of appetite, that the band glosses as leverpostej.

"Like A Word I Never Knew" catches the small delay through which sensation reaches the body before language finds its words. The track feels like LTJ Bukem as seen through the window of a smoked-out lounge. The saxophone trails over the rhythm in a half-lucid blur. "Interlude" carries the same smoky tint, though here it comes in like film noir jazz seeping through a doorway.

"Vik's Rawcore," with its nod toward Rotterdam hardcore, drives on the rude forward force of gabber, then swings through a jazz bridge and lets happy hardcore's old plastic brightness flicker back through vibraphone and xylophone.

Following the droney-ambience of the album's title track, "Fitness Bro" kicks things back into line with driving 4/4 techno, before "Jeg Ved Ikke Hvad Jeg Siger" (Translation: "I don't know what I'm saying") swerves into hip-hop for the disgruntled Gen Z Dane, stripped back to an old-school ragga pulse. Through a stream-of-consciousness rant about everything from Andrew Tate and Joe Rogan to Mette Frederiksen and Politiken, the lyric "anger without action is just fucking noise" hits hardest. Around it come fragments about Airbnb in Gaza, music imagined as endless competition, ADHD, cocaine, alcohol, Minecraft, and, in these days of active genocide, the reminder that "everything can be returned except children".

Continuing on this theme, "Ya Tal3een," then reworks a Palestinian folk song through Luna Ersahin of AySay. It begins with an Arabic poem directed toward those "climbing the mountain". Palestinian women reportedly sang the song outside the prisons to let jailed resistance fighters know that squads were coming to free them, telling the men inside that the present condition would not last.

By the end of this genre-mashing offering, someone's mother is in the bathroom telling you to drink water. "Hits 4 Kids Vol. 3000" throws a flash of euphoric euro-dance into the sequence before "Our Mothers Made A Punk Band" gives its final sixty-nine seconds to PPDS, Pas På Dig Selv, with the members' mothers on saxophones and drums. Something like noise-ska played through parental commandment, its screamed lyrics "Remember to drink water," "remember to have fun," "don't do drugs," "remember the bike lights," "remember to call your mother" spread across generations.

Since the 1970s, Christiania has lived under pressure of all sorts. From occupation and collective labor to criminal-capitalism and legal contestation, the Freetown has developed a dense civic texture over its half-century at the East end of Copenhagen. With SPDS, that density can be heard; roughened, yet still inhabited. Two saxophones and a drum kit generate propulsion, usually handled by synths and drum machines. SPDS draw their electronica from impact, reeds, sticks, and repeated breath. By the end, and true to the foundations of the freetown, This Is Why We Lost becomes a countercultural homily for the nonconformed.