'The Whole Room Was Just Boiling, You Could Just Feel It In The Air'

“I don’t think anyone thought we’d ever sing ‘I hope you fucking suffer!’ in a song, but it really feels like it was justified,” Johanna Soderberg offers. She says it with a laugh, but First Aid Kit aren’t joking. The song in question was their 2017 single You Are The Problem Here, a fierce rebuke against rape culture and victim blaming released on International Women’s Day. In it, the duo — Johanna, 27, and her sister Klara, 25 — let loose all of their anger; feelings that came to a head early last year when they recorded their newly released fourth album, Ruins, in America, in the wake of Trump’s inauguration.

“It’s been a shit year, from the start,” Soderberg says, at the end of '17, from her family home in Stockholm a few days before Xmas. Having spent so much time in America - first recording Ruins in Portland, Oregon; later returning to tour the country - they’ve felt their affection for the country starting to ebb. Reared on American music, the sisters’ folkie sound comes steeped in the influence of musicians from The Carter Family through to Fleet Foxes. “We’ve always had this romanticism, this romantic idea of America,” Soderberg laments. “In many ways, that was very naive because it’s always been a very segregated country; a lot of poverty, financial inequality. Before, we felt like there was a real hope and that’s gone now. That’s a little sad.”

In the decade since their debut EP, 2008’s Drunken Trees, Klara had written only one song, her sister thinks, that could be considered remotely political: Hard Believer, from their debut LP, 2010’s The Big Black And The Blue, a dismissal of organised religions. Unleashing something as angry, unflinching and direct as You Are The Problem Here, then, was quite a change. “We were a little scared to release that song,” Soderberg admits. “Mostly because it was really unexpected; it’s really harsh, really angry.”

The duo recorded it during the making of Ruins. They’d gone to Portland to record with Tucker Martine, whose work producing albums for Neko Case, My Morning Jacket, The Decemberists and his wife, Laura Veirs, the band loved. The Soderbergs' father, Benkt, is First Aid Kit’s live sound engineer and he uses Veirs’ 2010 LP July Flame to test PA systems at venues. “So, I think we’ve heard that album every day for the last six years,” Soderberg jokes.

Recorded in the snowy days of an Oregon winter, the band wanted to be “more open-minded, not so strictly folk-sounding” in their approach to Ruins. A rowdy, drunken chorus (filled with their family members) and brass parts on Hem Of Her Dress were inspired by Neutral Milk Hotel’s In The Aeroplane Over The Sea and elsewhere there’s more electric guitar than on previous records, even “'80s-sounding keyboards”. “We just wanted to have more of a raw, intense, live-performance feeling,” Soderberg says.

Yet, when they laid down You Are The Problem Here, it was a little too raw and intense. “It always just felt like its own thing, like it didn’t really fit on the record,” Soderberg says. “It’s very direct and very political. You can tell by the ending that the performance was fuelled by Donald Trump. We went to the Women’s March in Portland. That song was written out of pure anger. [It] needed to exist, for us.

“Whilst it’s not on the album, we’re still playing it live. And, it’s only grown as the year’s gone by, it’s gotten stronger. With the #MeToo campaign, people are really listening to it, taking it to heart; especially when we play it now. When we played it recently - when we were on tour in the US - the whole room was just boiling, you could just feel it in the air. A lot of women in the crowd just started yelling, really responding to it. It’s been very powerful to let those emotions out, to say those things.”

First Aid Kit will be bringing it - and their back catalogue of harmony-rich ballads - back to Australia in April for a run of shows that swiftly sold out. “Knowing that there’s such an anticipation makes me very excited,” Soderberg says. She’s interested to hear how the songs on Ruins, written after “Klara had been through a huge break-up", play to audiences.

The sisters never dictate what their songs will be about: “They come to us in the moment and we let them be what they want to be,” Soderberg says. “We can’t really control what we write about. The best songs we’ve ever written have all happened spontaneously, without much calculation.” But, she’s hoping, maybe there’ll be more angry anthems in their future. “With the state of the world, it feels so important to make a stand. Maybe we’ll write more politically themed songs in the future. Why the hell not?”