When my family and I made our first excursion into Stockholm proper, I stepped off of the train in Old Town and was immediately greeted by a flier advertising a fifty percent off record sale. I wasn’t about to abandon everyone to go record shopping, but the more time we spent in town, the more I saw these fliers popping up.

Finally, our last day in the city, we found ourselves in the neighborhood with the shop. I decided to split off to find this much-advertised sale and meet up with them later. I found the shop, tucked into a cobblestone alley up a steep set of stairs, and set to digging.

This cover art, from a band called HÄLLREGN (pronounced like Hell Rain, meaning torrential downpour) caught my eye. When the shopkeeper offered to play me a sample, I was surprised that despite its dark, foreboding album art and the band name written in what seemed like blood, it sounded like what would have happened if the Go-Gos were punkier, and also Swedish.

The sonic palette is tried and true pop punk: power chorded guitar, driving bass, and no-frills drums run under female vocals that range from sweet to barky. But what made me pull the trigger on this record was the popcraft that ran under all of that punk energy.

Even at their gnarliest and snarliest, Hällregn remains effortlessly catchy and infectiously inviting. I’ve often found that it is exceptionally difficult to write simple songs that are also compelling, and that is the name of Hällregn’s game. They aren’t reinventing any wheels or breaking any new ground or whatever other tired metaphor for sonic exploration I could make right here.

And with results like this, it’s good that they didn’t. This is the kind of catchy pop punk that gets caught in your head and plays on repeat, transcending era and language barriers (because, let me reiterate, this is all in Swedish). As far as souvenirs go, it certainly beats the copy of Super Trouper I bought last time I was there.