Why Swedish Four-Piece Dungen Are Too Hip To Be Square

"In 2008, Kevin Parker sent me this CD, saying: 'we're a band from Australia, can you mix this?'" recounts Gustav Ejstes, leader of Swedish psych-rockers Dungen. "And it was so good, I just said to him: 'I don't know what to do with this. You should just put it out as it is'. People talk about Tame Impala biting our style, but I don't really see it. He's younger than me, but I think he was doing something parallel to us."

Dungen's 2006 Australian tour has been cited as hugely influential on the Tame Impala/Pond family, and the Swedes are finally returning to Australia ten years on. "It's going to be exciting to see if anyone shows up to see this Swedish band singing in Swedish, if anyone remembers us from last time," Ejstes laughs.

"Popular music culture is filled with this longing for something else, it's always moving on."

Ejstes, 36, grew up in Lanna, a tiny village outside Jonkoping, where his parents - music teacher father, church organist mother - had him playing violin, piano, and guitar from an early age. He had no dreams of making music a career ("teaching six-year-olds to play violin or playing organ at another funeral must be a drag, so, there was no glamour associated with music for me"), but Ejstes was drawn to "trying to break the codes of the music that [he] loved, and make something" for himself.

Initially, he just wanted to impress his elder brothers, but after moving to Stockholm and putting out a couple of small-run LPs, he cut 2002's Stadsvandringar for a major label. "It got about a 50/50 response. There were a lot of people who hated it, because at that time it was not particularly hip to be related to '60s/'70s Swedish psych music. That was the beginning of my career: getting bad records and being a commercial failure," Ejstes recounts.

But, then, buoyed by Pitchfork praise, the third Dungen LP, 2004's Ta Det Lugnt, "became this 'indie hit'". "Going through that experience - first being dissed, then having hip New Yorkers tell you how great you are - meant that I could never take anything too seriously after that," Ejstes offers. "Now I've been doing this for 15 years and I've been hip two separate times, and not hip for many years. Popular music culture is filled with this longing for something else, it's always moving on. So, whilst it's great when your music is being acclaimed, you know there's going to be a time when no one will want to listen to it."

Dungen will be touring locally behind two LPs, 2015's Allas Sak and their newly announced instrumental soundtrack Haxan; the pop-cultural climate once more welcoming of their exploratory psych. Ejstes hopes that Dungen, eight albums in, still have something to offer. "We joke about how [guitarist] Reine [Fiske], who's this crazy record nerd, has this classic saying: 'yeah, their first two records are good'. Is that the situation with Dungen? Our first two records are good? It's hard for me to say, but I'm trying my best to make sure it's not."