Asian Cowboy - Inlandet
With their debut EP Inlandet, out October 10, Asian Cowboy send a post-hardcore dispatch from the Northern expanse.
There are places the maps barely bother with. Cold stretches of timber and silence, thousands of square miles wrested into use by stubborn men and women since the stone age. Forests breached, mountains climbed, rapids overcome by ragged ingenuity. Towns raised and abandoned in man’s restless search of easier money. All of it flattened into a single, mostly green page, sliced through by thin, jagged gashes of road.
They call it the inland. Inlandet. A frostbitten expanse that shapes the sound as much as the people. A land of distance, hunger, abandonment. Where nothing lasts for long but the wind in the trees. That same restless current runs through Asian Cowboy. They cut close to the bone, without sermon nor disguise. They let you know what to expect, like a bomb with the wires left exposed.
Inlandet isn’t a debut so much as a message from the middle of nowhere. Four tracks carved out of sleepless nights and borrowed time. A sound like two strangers crossing paths in the snow, neither speaking.
Anomaly. All That I Dread. Ode to Old Nick. And Unlisted – a half-stripped, semi-acoustic cover of Hot Snakes. Anxious post-hardcore bent against garage punk, guitars like wreckage, basslines like pulse, voices cracked and unsteady, as if the body itself can’t lie. Followers of Viagra Boys, Refused, Quicksand, or even the desert churn of Queens of the Stone Age will find echoes here, in a scorched sound built as much to bruise as it is to soothe.
The band is four deep out of Luleå, Sweden: Anton Alamaa (guitar, vocals), Ea Sundström (bass, vocals), Isak Sidestam (guitar, vocals), and Arvid Löfgren (drums). Alamaa mixed and produced it, Sundström and Magnus Lindberg saw it mastered. They have walked other roads before, with Mattias Alkberg, Dennis Lyxzén, Raring, Nagoon, and Ur Tajgan. But this is the first time all four have come to the fire together.
Inlandet arrives October 10th.
(BD Pop/DigiNorth)
Bio
See the band. Their t-shirts ragged and thin, sun bleached like motel curtains. They can neither dance nor smile and in them broods already a taste for mindless violence.
Every now and then they play a show. The lights are bright, the air thick, neon buzzing like horseflies. The room smells of sweat and something sticky, and the sound rattles in people’s ribs like echoes of a bad decision. Sometimes, people scream the lyrics back at them, or maybe they are just screaming. It doesn’t matter. They play because the world is loud and broken, and they’ve got nothing better to do than make noise right back.
They call themselves Asian Cowboy, but it’s just a name, just something to say when people ask. They grew up where the streetlights flicker and the nights last for weeks. The wind tastes like sawdust and sulphur and they play for the muddy car wrecks and the bloated mosquitoes. Post-hardcore, indie rock, static scraped from the surface on the TV screen, hissing like a seething viper. Drums pounding like something trying to break free.
The songs are about burning bridges, waking up in the same place no matter how far you run. But there’s a kind of comfort in that. Maybe.
And if you hear them—really hear them—maybe they’re not just shouting into the void.