Girl Scout

Swedish four-piece Girl Scout have a road-tested, kinetic indie rock sound reminiscent of Snail Mail or Big Thief. It’s a world away from the band’s humble beginnings steeped in jazz theory, years before the release of EPs including Real Life Human Garbage (2023) and Headache (2024) or opening for beloved indie pop acts like Alvvays. Indeed, the roots of Girl Scout trace back to studies at the Royal Academy of Music in Stockholm, where guitarists Emma Jansson and Viktor Spasov met as jazz theory students. With Sweden serving as a fertile breeding ground for decades of pop tradition, they studied generations of Western songwriters and producers, eventually finding steady gig work as a duo, playing covers of everyone from Burt Bacharach to the Beatles in their own jazzy arrangements. But both had an affinity for 21st century rock revivalists from the Strokes to the 1975 — a style not terribly common from within the country — and started working on their own original material in that vein. The pair quickly expanded, bringing in another classmate, Evelina Arvidsson Ekland, to play bass, and a friend of Spasov’s, Per Lindberg, joined on drums. While their first rehearsal yielded the bones of half a dozen songs, Girl Scout was, like other bands new and old, quickly waylaid by the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Undeterred, they continued woodshedding demos and attracted the interest of local label Made Records, which released the group’s first singles “Do You Remember Sally Moore?” and “All the Time and Everywhere” in 2022, collected a year later with other cuts on their debut EP, Real Life Human Garbage. The band’s appealing lo-fi sound, augmented with equally D.I.Y. music videos shot on camcorders, attracted buzz and a run of tour dates opening for Coach Party in the United Kingdom. A second EP arrived seven months after Real Life Human Garbage; Granny Music, named for an infamous dig at Paul McCartney from John Lennon, expanded their sonic palette, letting in some jazz influences (“Millionaire”) and even touches of Springsteen (“Mothers and Fathers”). Their third EP, Headache, arrived in November 2024, after Girl Scout’s biggest concert coup yet: an opening slot for Alvvays on a European tour. ~ Mike Duquette