Kid, Feral recorded the drums for their second album in October 2019. They finished the rest of it almost seven years later.
“2019,” the Skövde quartet‘s sophomore LP, came out May 29 on Oslo’s Backpack Records. Eight songs, just over thirteen minutes, mostly tracks that don’t clear the two-minute mark.
The band cut everything in their own rehearsal space and handled the mixing and mastering themselves. Vocalist and guitarist Vile Hartman is specific about one production choice: they kept the master warm, against the harsh treble-heavy default that defines a lot of screamo. The point was making a record you could turn up.
Those October 2019 drums sat there while everything else came apart. Their bassist Ossian left. The pandemic locked Hartman into what he describes as “one of those relationships where you get stuck together in a situation with someone due to COVID.”
Then his hand started hurting, and the soreness kept getting worse. It turned into a nerve issue that, at its worst, ran at a 9/10 pain level around the clock. It persists to this day.
“Honestly, in my darkest moments, I thought my life was kind of done,” Hartman says. “But like things usually do, it got better and better, but very very VERY slowly.”
Surgery, eventually, freed enough of the nerve that he could pick up a guitar again.
Since 2024, the band has been climbing back. New bassist Jonathan Holmström learned the existing songs from scratch, and the rest of them, in Hartman’s words, “had to learn how to be a band again.” They added guitarist Jack Smith Insulander, expanding to a four-piece for the first time. They put out an EP. They flew to Canada for New Friends Fest. They opened for Touché Amoré in Oslo, a show Hartman reckons they “totally bombed” because the stage was too big and they were still a three-piece. “We needed to level up, which is why we recruited our new guitarist, Jack,” he says.
They toured England, Ireland, and Scotland. They played Third Impact Fest in Italy, with a specific shoutout to Giacomo of Niente Concerti for the Feltre date. Hartman calls the whole stretch a second wind. That’s what convinced them to finish “2019.
The Oslo Touché Amoré show also put them in front of the man who’d eventually release “2019.”
Jørgen, the Norwegian behind Backpack Records, was hosting bands and offering couches. Kid, Feral didn’t know yet that he ran the label. Months later, Backpack’s ten-year anniversary show came around and Jørgen invited them to play, even without any formal connection. They took the car up to Norway and said yes.
Before the set, he told the crowd he thought people would still care about Kid, Feral in twenty years. Hartman, who admits any artist denying some level of narcissism is lying, filed it away. When it came time to pick a label for the record, the choice made itself.
“In a world of declining interest in any culture, where the default activity seems to be sitting in a grey room and scrolling on your phone, Jørgen is the kind of guy who rages against that dying of the light,” Hartman says. “He will put out awesome records, put up amazing shows and call out any lame ass who should come out to the shows that didn’t. He represents the sparks that turn into fire, the indestructible glue that holds people together. Truly a mountain of a man.” He went above and beyond for the vinyl pressing, Hartman adds.
The lyrics on “2019” are also seven years old, written during the band’s youth and released, as Hartman jokes, at the dawn of their middle age.
The album is named for the year it was supposed to come out, and Hartman wanted the songs locked into that past tense from the start. “It’s how I felt at the time, but it still reflects me as a person. I wouldn’t be able to write lyrics that didn’t apply to me.”
Skövde itself, where Kid, Feral is based, doesn’t have a screamo scene.
“There’s not really any other small town screamo bands in the area, so we just kinda do our thing on our own for the moment,” Hartman says. The local hardcore community has filled the gap, putting them on bills and bringing them into the same rooms.
“Hardcore and screamo stick together,” Hartman says. “It’s awesome. Sweden’s screamo proper, smaller and more scattered than the country’s hardcore lineage, lives in the bigger cities. Hartman points to Barabbas du förtappade and 44caliber love letter, plus the new BABA IAGA record (three quarters of whom previously played in emo violence band Setsuko).
The PR copy lines the sound up alongside Birds in Row spiralling into chaos with early Touché Amoré and the burn of Portrayal of Guilt. What the band say themselves is plainer: messy, honest, unfiltered, and built to push the genre somewhere a little different. Their stated hope is that someone else hears it and tries doing things their own way.
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Kid, Feral are Vile Hartman (guitar, vocals), Jesper Sundell (drums), Jonathan Holmström (bass), and Jack Smith Insulander (guitar).
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