The Radio Dept - sleeping in, 2006

"I knew next to nothing about these guys The Radio Dept. A three piece originally from Lund, Sweden – who named themselves after a petrol station which was converted into a new premises repairing transistor radios. But I was already enraptured by the wonderfully dreamy sounds I was hearing from all their YouTube videos. Founded by Johan Duncanson, and joined by Martin Larsson and later Daniel Tjäder, with several other musical collaborators among them: Per Blomgren, Lisa Carlberg, and Elin Almered. The band were a core trio for the most part but often the line-up fluctuated to become a quartet, even a quintet, before once more settling for the trio / duo. Thus it transpires they’d been around a fair while – 2001 when they released their first music – but their genesis started even further back than that in the mid 1990s. To bring things to the present, their recorded output to date has been sporadic, if not exactly wildly prolific, in quantity. Since their formation in 2001 they have issued four studio albums and a dozen or so singles, plus many other download only tracks. The average gap between studio albums during this two decade stretch has been about five to six years. But, crucially, that is hardly of much consequence given that I belatedly discovered their music in 2019, by which time all of their physical singles and albums were readily available to seek out wherever I could, and so that was what I did as much as possible. I glutted on everything they brought out, belatedly picking up all their albums on CD, given that I had already fallen hopelessly in love with their music. Even more significantly, their records offered me solace and provided me with a comfort blanket during those horribly anxious times in 2020 to 2021 when everything – life as we all knew it – fell off a cliff and the world seemingly stood still due to the pandemic and lockdowns."