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.