Interview with Longfield & Super Skeleton: ‘Our last album Void of Glitter/Constantly Bitter is a rock album but this one takes some leaps’

Haugesund, Norwegian rockers Longfield & Super Skeleton will release their third album ‘Daylight, the Devil’ on 26 August.

Conceived one sweltering summer night six years ago in a recording studio, Longfield & Super Skeleton consists of six fellas, all from the stormy Norwegian coast who, in their words ‘are in no way, shape or form here to waste anyone’s time’. They describe their sound as ‘Boney M. dragging Old Scratch himself up from Hell by his trachea for a sultry, filth-ridden boogie, all the while tearing into pink bubble gum and clawing rabidly at the true sinners of today’. Their mantra, as they put it, is: ‘Long past are the dark days, it is now time for the boys to carry out their bidding and change rock’s crumbling stature as an ultra-macho, belligerent, flannel-wielding brute, to an all including and all giving creature of love, spite and desire to do whatever the fuck it wants. All are invited, especially those that despise it the most.’

The band comprises Jarle Langåker (vocals and guitar), Christian Sjøthun (drums), Dean Christiansen (bass), Ken-Tore Kallevåg (synthesizers) and Christian Sæløen (guitar). Ole Marius Saltvik (guitar) was the sixth member until he moved away. As a band, they are brilliantly hard to pigeonhole, mashing up rock, disco, punk, synth pop and new wave with gleeful abandon. I ask if they met at school. ‘I don’t think half the band went to school,’ Langåker deadpanned. ‘Me and Dean are old friends, we’d played together before with our old drummer. We’ve changed a lot of guitarists over the years!’ The band has existed for two years with the current band members. The ‘Longfield’ part of their name is Langåker’s surname translated into English and the ‘skeleton’ part comes from some ‘inside humour’ from their former drummer. Christiansen turns out to be Irish and jokes that his mother met a Norwegian man ‘who kidnapped us’ and has lived in Norway ever since.

‘It’s so fast, too fast for our own good!‘

‘Daylight, the Devil’ will comprise 10 tracks, including previously released singles ‘Whatever’, ‘Suffer’, ‘Parasite’, ‘Privilege’ and ‘Born Trash’ as well as five new tracks. ‘Whatever’, which they released as a single last month, is a powerhouse of a track, launching straight in without an intro and featuring some incredibly hooky guitar lines and some fast and furious drumming from Sjøthun, as well as a blistering guitar solo from Sæløen a couple of minutes in: ‘It’s a bitch to play live,’ Langåker said, laughing. ‘It’s so fast, too fast for our own good! I sing the backup vocals as well, ‘cos I’m the fucking star (laughs) but when we play it live, the whole band sings backing vocals. We sort of had the riff written by our old guitarist, Ole Marius. For the record we’re about to release, we moved into the recording studio for a week and started jamming this song. I went into the other room and wrote the lyrics when the others finished the song. I was thinking about social media and how you’re expected to present a “dream” version of yourself. People are living in front of their screens trying to impress people they don’t even like. There’s a growing sense of entitlement in people, their own claim to fame but the song is a statement that I wanna do what I love.’

As ‘Whatever’ kicks off: ‘Toxic masculinity never had much of an effect on me. I’ve got better things to do than getting caught up in what everybody else do. You might think I’m jealous, baby, I couldn’t care less. People tell me my agony and all my apathy is gonna catch up with me…’

Sæløen weighs in: ‘In general, we do what feels natural,’ he said. ‘A song has its own driver, it’s natural to where it wants to go.’ Langåker agrees: ‘We’re afraid of songs getting boring,’ he said. I tell him there is zero chance of that. ‘We have so many impulses when we’re making songs, past the whole verse-chorus-verse structure, although some of them have that, too. I never get bored of playing our songs, they’re fun to make and play.’

Interestingly, ‘Daylight, the Devil’ marks a departure in terms of how they write their songs, which they have started to jam out more together, according to Kallevåg. Previously, most of the songs would be written in advance and also often demoed by Langåker before the band heard them. ‘Before this lineup, there was nowhere near the musical chemistry we have together as a group today,’ Langåker said. ‘Our last album Void of Glitter/Constantly Bitter is a rock album but this one takes some leaps,’ he said animatedly. ‘There’s a ballad, some darker songs, there’s a bigger mixture of what we want to play.’ Christiansen jumps in: ‘It’s not just riff rock,’ he said. Kallevåg laughs: ‘It’s synthtastic!,’ he said. They all laugh: ‘I get exhausted watching Ken,’ Langåker grinned. “He has four or five synths, a cowbell going on, and all these other things!’

‘I’d lied to the band and said I had a great riff but I didn’t!’

‘Suffer’ is an incredibly tight track, which kicks off with a distinctive cowbell, and is one of their danciest tracks; it is also a prime example of a song that they jammed into fruition: ‘We just jammed it out,’ Christiansen said. Langåker agrees: ‘It was written completely on the spot,’ he said. ‘I’d lied to the band and said I had a great riff but I didn’t (laughs)! I was sort of panicking! It touches on the same subject as ‘Whatever’, about needing to make your own choices in life. You’re pressurised everywhere, it’s all “school, school, school”. I’m a teacher, I teach subjects like music, maths and religion and I can see the tendencies to feel the pressure to go to things like soccer practice.’ Christiansen agrees: ‘One of the threads is calling people out on their shit, and there’s a lot of it!’

‘Suffer’ has a hint of both the macabre and the circus showman about it, as evidenced by the lyrics : ‘Crack your knuckles, pop your bones. Straighten up your tie. Paint your face with glitter. Cross your heart and hope to die.’

Langåker cites ‘Privilege’ as his favourite song on the upcoming album: ‘I am especially proud of that track, it doesn’t sound like anything we’ve made before,’ he said. ‘We’ve also got a ballad ‘Hungry Eyes’, which sounds like a love song on the surface but I wrote the lyrics after watching the Belgian horror movie ‘Raw’ (laughs), so there’s darkness in it.’ Christiansen laughs: ‘The song has a dark side, like him!,’ he said.

The bass hook for ‘Privilege’ was something that Langåker came up with when he and Sjøthun were tracking drums for the song ‘Benzodiazepine’ on their Void of Glitter/Constantly Bitter album: ‘I got a big kick out of it, so we hastily recorded a 30 second demo and saved it for later,’ he said. ‘The subject touches on the idea of privilege, and how people use it to criticize people with opinions different than their own, without really knowing what situation a person is coming from.’

Christiansen says his favourite of their new songs is ‘Let Loose’: ‘It’s got that vibe that’s dark, primal and sexy,’ he said. ‘It varies between loud and not loud.’ Langåker nods: ‘We just jammed it. I used the lyrics that I already had but I made more.’ Kallevåg is trying to decide which songs he likes best: ‘I may want to say ‘Hungry Eyes’, I’m so excited to see how it will work live but I really like ‘Let Loose’ as well.’

‘It’s our only instance of writing a song based on a movie’

‘Hungry Eyes’ was initially envisaged as a song for Langåker’s other band, Kindred Fever: ‘But we never got it right and I was excited to try out something completely different in LSS,’ he said. ‘When I saw ‘Raw’ a couple of years ago, I was taken aback by the sadness that weighed over the film. The premise for the movie is cannibalism, so they could’ve gone in a completely different direction. I’m glad they didn’t! It’s our only instance of writing a song based on a movie, and I don’t see that happening again any time soon, though ‘Monsters, Inc.’ has inspired us time and time again!’

Interestingly, ‘Let Loose’ marks their first song together with their current line up: ‘I had the idea of the song in advance, with a couple of guitar recordings on my iPhone,’ Langåker said. ‘It was put together sort of as a jam the first time we ever rehearsed together in 2020, and it remained almost unchanged until we recorded it for ‘Daylight, the Devil’. We got a bit carried away while we were recording the song, and had a long chanting intro that we luckily scrapped! I can’t wait to play it live, and see how the audience responds to the primal, almost hypnotizing beat.’

Sæløen joins in: ‘I like all our songs but my favourite is ‘Born Trash’, it has got such a chill vibe to it, and I love the chorus and the weirdness of the solo part.’

Musically, they bring a lot of different influences into the mix, although they all share a common love of older country music by Loretta Lynn, Waylon Jennings and Hank Williams – as well as a shared love of tracksuits. Their own sound has also been amplified since they shook up the line up to include Sæløen: ‘Now, we have two guitarists that want to work together and enjoy it together,’ Christiansen said. ‘You tell Christian (Sæløen) to do something and he does it ten times better than you could ever have imagined.’

Christiansen and Langåker have overlapping influences: ‘We both love Nick Cave, his charisma and his work ethic,’ Langåker said. ‘He punches into an office every morning, that stuck with me. We work very hard and we don’t take anything for granted.’ Kallevåg nods: ‘I like Creedence and Vulfpeck – the search for music never ends!’ Sæløen cites Metallica as an early influence before shifting more towards Norwegian rock and other sounds: ‘In the last six or seven years, Queens of the Stone Age have inspired me the most,’ he said. ‘Since I auditioned for the band, I listen to our stuff the most, and being able to play music with them is amazing.’

‘You don’t know where you’ll end up, probably in jail!’

Christiansen would love to have a pint with Queens of the Stone Age frontman Josh Homme: ‘You don’t know where you’ll end up, probably in jail!,’ he quipped. Langåker is in deep thought: ‘Oh, my lord! Not Nick Cave, I’d feel like an idiot, he’s a super smart person. I’ll say Hank Williams, he’s stuck with me my whole life since I was five or six, he’s my most favourite musician in the whole world.’ Endearingly, Sæløen picks Kallevåg: ‘Our Ken always cracks me up, he’s a laugh, so I want to go for a drink with him!’ Kallevåg laughs: ‘Not Christian but now I feel I should say Christian! Maybe Creedence for me because of how it went to shit. They were 19 and made ‘Proud Mary’, it would be a story. Or Vulfpeck to learn how they got so far with such a small band.’

In their eye-catching photo, they are wearing their much-loved Adidas tracksuits, the guitarists brandishing their white guitars and the others unleashing coloured smoke, atop a red, slightly dystopian ground and I ask where they are. ‘We took that photo in Visnes, the day we shot our music video for ‘Born Trash’, Langåker said. ‘Fun fact about that place: some of the Statue of Liberty copper comes from there.’

I ask them what their dream line up would look like and Langåker gets very animated: ‘Oh, that’s nice! I would go for Jack White and Billie Eilish. They’re eccentric and completely individualistic. Nobody else sounds or looks like that.’ Christiansen laughs: ‘He just gave a really good answer!’ Langåker laughs: ‘He loves Modern Talking and Boney M.,’ he told me. Christiansen grins: ‘I got Ken a vinyl box set of Boney M. for Christmas – he still hasn’t opened it! I’ll go with Scatt Brothers, they did songs like ‘Walk The Night’. Are they gay anthems?,’ he asked his bandmates. They decide that they are. Sæløen has other ideas: ‘My top picks won’t be as funny,’ he joked. ‘Can I have Queens of the Stone Age and Rammstein? I’ve seen them both live before and both shows had such an impact on me, I’ve never seen anything like it. Rammstein had an enormous and impressively well put together production that was more of a large-scale full theatrical experience than just a concert. Queens of the Stone Age to me is THE band, so to see them perform live was just a long sought after dream come true.’ Langåker is looking at them mischievously: ‘Between the acts, we can do the entertainment!’

Their camaraderie on our Zoom is really infectious and it’s clear that they genuinely have a lot of fun together: ‘We enjoy each other’s company very much,’ Langåker said. ‘We make all of our own music videos, and shooting for ‘Chivalry Is Dead’, ‘Tight Leash’ and ‘Parasite’ was especially a big laugh. Not that long ago, we were asked to play at the end of a football event for the Norwegian team FKH in an attempt on their behalf to have the audience stick around after player announcements, or something like that. The whole audience consisting of around 200-300 people stood up and left during the first half of our set. It was clear we had stumbled onto alien ground, especially with one guy standing all the way in the back giving us the finger. Comedy gold!’

(Top photo from left to right: front row: Dean, Jarle and Ken. Back row: Christian (Sally), Christian (Sjøthun) and Ole.)