First spin on Menderbug’s new single — the instinct was to file its first seconds of run time somewhere near generic indie rock. Further spin, the read shifts. It starts pulling at a memory — somewhere dreamy, close to the vibe of Jeniferever, one of favorite acts from Swedish, whose vocals and elegant, mellow builds sat in a place almost nobody else could get to.
Menderbug don’t sound exactly like that. What Marcus and Jonas have going in rural southern Sweden is tighter, more condensed, closer to shoegaze alt-rock than post rockish wide-open mellow. But the pull lands in a familiar place — the kind of track that could slot behind a long, quiet scene in a film and do half the work for the director. They’ve got a handful of Spotify listeners right now. That’s about to move.
Menderbug is a year old. Marcus sings, Jonas plays bass, and everything else — guitars, recording, production — the two of them split between them. There’s no scene nearby. No rehearsal complex, no venues a short drive away, no wave to ride.
“At first that distance felt like a disadvantage,” they say. “There’s always this idea that music needs context — a city, a network, a wave to ride. But after a while we realised the distance was shaping the music more honestly than any scene could. No pressure to innovate. No pressure to conform either. Just two people trying to make something that feels real.”
Call it slowcore, shoegaze, alt-rock, post-rock, indie — the tag doesn’t really matter and they know it. They accept slowcore themselves because yes, there’s restraint, space, repetition. But they also get restless. They like distortion but don’t want to hide inside reverb. They like the weight of layered guitars, and they also like when a song feels like it might wobble off its axis.
Their read on the current shoegaze wave is direct. A lot of it, they say, feels “overly finished. Beautiful, but sealed. Sanded smooth.” Every time they polished one of their own tracks too much, something essential leaked out — a small hesitation in a vocal take, a slight imbalance in a mix, the sense that the whole thing could fall apart and hasn’t.
So they started leaving things slightly undone.
“Not as an aesthetic gimmick,” they explain, “but as a way of protecting the initial impulse. We build the songs carefully — the structures are thought through, the arrangements intentional — but we try not to suffocate them with perfection. The production is clean enough to carry weight, but open enough to let air in.”
Being a two-piece forces the issue. You can’t fill every frequency. As they put it: “Sometimes the best move is to leave space instead of adding another layer. Sometimes distortion says more than clarity.” They also write fast — the first version of a song, they say, “often contains something raw that disappears if we try to improve it too much.”
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The single is a taste of “Falling Voices,” the first of three EPs Menderbug have already mapped out. Next single “Where Stillness Left” drops May 15. After that, roughly one release a month for at least a year, maybe longer. A Bandcamp is coming. For now it’s Spotify and Instagram.
The way they put the whole project themselves stays low-key in a way that isn’t that common: “Menderbug isn’t about positioning ourselves inside a genre or chasing a moment. It’s more about creating a small, contained space where we can meet regularly, drink tea, talk about what’s weighing on us, and turn that into sound.”
“Maybe that’s what ‘left slightly undone’ really means for us. Not unfinished. Just human.”
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