Though Horse Vision only has a grip of singles out, the Swedish band has already hit on a somewhat definitive, future-forward guitar music aesthetic. The duo of Johan Nilsson and Gabriel von Essen make music in conversation with a new crop of artists bending the language of the guitar in service of fresh sonic ideas—the band shouts out plenty of examples below—but, for Horse Vision, pop pleasure takes precedence. Simply put: They write anthems that you will want to put on repeat. We talked to Nilsson, read the interview—and listen to “Chemicals,” their new single with Tiffi M—below.

Horse Vision is fairly new. What was your vision for the band's sound at the beginning of the project? Has that changed at all?

Johan Nilsson: When we began writing and recording music together, the main idea was sharing what we like doing in order to attract like-minded people. Originally it began with me, Johan, having a ton of music but no name to release it under and Gabriel having a list of band names. We’ve always been huge fans of rock, alternative stuff, guitar-driven stuff. Our first demos were strictly instrumental, very simple, performed and recorded in a classic rock trio setting—”Segundi Garinasso” epitomizes that side of Horse Vision—but we quickly began to lean into making music with more impact, less minimalistic, and incorporating sounds we’d gathered from scoring films, experimenting in Max/MSP and sampling the internet.

So far, you've released a drip of singles. Are you working on an album? Are you interested in making a sort of classically cohesive-sounding full-length?

Releasing singles is really fun; originally we intended to release single tracks once a month and stick to that format, but eventually we’ve realized there is a potential in releasing a compiled body of work. When you’re just getting started, releasing music in a compiled format can easily be drowned by the noise. Now we’re still a tiny band, but at least we’re reaching through to someone, so it makes sense to compile stuff. The 13-track album—14 if you count the one extra on the physical version—is called Another Life and will be released on our own label inadvertent.index on March 7th. Since we didn’t write the songs with an album in mind, Another Life is a kind of compilation of the music we’ve done this far. The material is probably more diverse than what it would have been if we originally set out to make an album.

How does your songwriting process usually start?

Usually it begins with wanting to write a song like the one that you’ve been listening to all day; other producers, artists, and bands are generally the main source of inspiration. Writing “Segundi Garinasso” came out of wanting to write a song as beautiful as “Gold Dust” by Duster, “Toxoplasma” was made wanting to create something as beautiful as “Dust” by You’ll Never Get To Heaven; “Partly Get By” is the hybrid of inspiration stemming from “Emotions” by John Glacier and “Where Is My Mind” by Pixies. We want to be really explicit about our influences, as we think that’s more fun than hiding them. Some of the tracks are written together in the studio, usually with guitars. We play solely in drop D, so riffs and chords are the backbone of every track. If songs don’t come very easy, we usually don’t spend too much time on them. The path of least resistance is usually the funnier one.

Sometimes tracks lie around for quite some time until we one day realize that we can use them and mix them with something that has inspired us recently; “Partly Get By” was originally an acoustic one-and-a-half minute tune lying on a hard drive that we had to finalize in order to play our first show. We needed tracks to fill out the set time, so to make it more suitable for a late club set, we made a clattered full band arrangement of it and added the driving synths that became characteristic of the song. We’ve always been careful to sample melodies, sounds, phrases, and noises in periods of not recording, so there’s usually a sound bank to every riff that can be paired together. Once the guitars and melodies are in place, we ornament the music with sounds and textures that makes it fun and interesting to listen to; we like to think that a splash of a certain sonic element can give the underlying pop rock track a bit more depth and contextualization.

I've detected a few samples in your music. What's your attitude towards outside sound sources?

We’ve always been hugely inspired by sample-oriented music; spanning from hip-hop to musique concrète, dub, and jungle. A form of sampling is also apparent in the work of Arthur Jaffa and Adam Curtis, both making films and videos; the idea of conglomerating already-existent material in new hybrid shapes and forms, highlighting perspectives of the original material in a new context. We like to think that we use sampling as a way to showcase our inspirations, to pay homage to what has inspired what we make, but also as a way to make the tracks more interesting to listen to as well as to make. Like Burial said in the interview with Mark Fisher, we also tend to “[...] use the rain to cover up the lameness of [our] tunes.”

Processing sampled stuff, whether it be drums or field recordings or films or reels, gives the music a sonic quality that we really like. We’re not orthodox acoustic musicians at all; whatever works and whatever sounds good. Sometimes when we’re uninspired, we’ll run a field recording of a train ride through iZotope RX and extract some really beautiful sounds by exaggerating the spectral processing. We couldn’t recreate those in any studio with live instruments, ever, but that kind of sonic admiration is really important to us. We use non-musical sounds as it acts in a beautiful way to suggest a place in which the music is set. Sometimes the setting is dark, gloomy and haunted, at other times more polished, alien, glossy; non-musical sounds and samples help us in presenting that setting and being able to somehow shape the setting in which someone hears our music.

Who are some of your favorite pop rock bands? How do they influence your own songwriting?

Right now I’d say there’s a lot of amazing music coming out that I’d place in the field of pop rock, although they’d probably disprove of that. It kind of feels like there needs to be a general reboot with the terms “alternative” and “experimental.” We always tell people we make pop rock; we wouldn’t really call it alternative- or experimental-something as we’re a bit too vanilla for that, depending on who you ask.

Our music is pop as in somewhat-easily-explainable—therefore exploitable—and rock due to the setting and means through which the music is made and performed, with somewhat distinct lead vocals, repetitive melodic content, riff-oriented ... Our music tends to be quite minimal; both in harmony, production and instrumentation. Gabriel’s girlfriend said that the music sounds like a restrained and moderate person, who at the same time has this amazing inner life that sometimes shines through. I’m not sure we get that from pop rock bands though. Our love for Elliot Smith is great. Stina Nordenstam, The Cardigans we really like. And Alex G on House Of Sugar, it was a huge record for us when it came out.

Pop rock is a framework to us; the “pop” part is putting a lot of weight on the structure of the music and the “rock” part emphasizes the instrumentation. Rock has a rather dull set of cultural and structural phenomena built into it, but we like to think of ourselves as a rock band when it comes to the instruments we play and the harmonic content of the music.

Tell us about the Horse Vision live show.

We’re doing a small tour as we’re releasing the album and we’ve set it up in a way that the intensity of each set can be easily adjusted, depending on the venue. We’re doing a couple of late shows in small nightclubs and another show in an old warehouse in the middle of the day, so it makes sense to adjust the set to the setting. When we make the music, we’ve always intended it to be heard on headphones, kind of scoring the listeners day, but when it comes to playing live some things have to be adjusted. Recorded music is lovely, but we’d like a live show to be more theatrical; more site-specific.

The foundation of the live set is structured around a three-piece band—bass, guitar, and drums—while all additional sounds are digital, computer-generated. Further down, if our budget allows it, we strive to play everything live with a big band, kind of a Slipknot setting. We want it to be a distinction between the album and performed versions; we don’t really think it’s about performing the music as it was recorded, as it wouldn’t really make sense; the music exists outside of its recorded, frozen form and we think it is exciting to exaggerate—as well as neglect—certain elements of the recorded music when performing it live.

What is the dream Horse Vision collaboration?

Spending a day making music with Joni Mitchell would be wild. Or Arthur Russell, if we could dream.

Are you excited about the current state of guitar music?

We’ve been guitar and bass players our entire lives, but never really until these past years thought of it as being something that could fuel our entire musical output. I remember hearing “Neofolk” by nykolaes and Daniël Paul a few years back and thinking how incredible it was to hear people reinventing guitar ballads like that. Right now, there are so many incredible artists that make beautiful guitar-oriented music: ML Buch, Forma Norte, Contacto, GB, Colle, snuggle, deer park, Tiffi M, Armlock, Fine, Sindy, A Good Year, Sunchaser—it’s so inspiring. It’s not necessarily so much about the guitar in itself, but the way people find new ways to utilize and contextualize the guitar in tandem with other contemporary ideas regarding songwriting, storytelling, and music production. Few things can be as tacky as the guitar, but it can also be so cool, hot, beautiful and relevant.