Kings Of Convenience - L’antidoto acustico

We are two acoustic musicians not influenced by acoustic music

(Erlend Øye)

Kings Of Convenience are the acoustic duo from Bergen, Norway, who since 2001 have been slowly dispensing their own personal antidote to the frenzy that has infected the world, well before the now-notorious batvirus entered our lives. Erlend Øye and Eirik Glambek Bøe, both born in 1975, have four albums to their name in 21 years, plus one remix record, and not a single compilation or live album. Theirs isn't so much a career as the musical story of a friendship that began in the Norway of the 1990s.

Both picked up the guitar at fifteen, driven by their respective passions: Erlend was fixated on the Norwegian band a-ha, whose cassette he had to alternate in the living-room player with his mother's copy of Leonard Cohen; Eirik, meanwhile, was absorbed in the bossa nova record by Joao Gilberto, Astrud Gilberto and Stan Getz, "Live At Carnagie Hall," which his mother listened to often and which helped open his eyes to the musical essentials needed to write songs and communicate them to an audience. "We'd bought the guitars and neither of us knew how to play them – our friendship grew thanks to music," Eirik recalls of the early days of his relationship with Erlend. "In the first years, I think the nickname for our first band (Skog) was 'the worst band in Bergen.'"

A start like any other, then, in the cold Norway of the 1990s – and without falling into easy stereotypes, the locals' reactions to their first shows were no less icy. Erlend, who has lived in Syracuse, Sicily for several years now, recalls: "Bergen is a city where, after you step off the stage following a show, someone might come up to you and tell you that you really didn't play very well."

Skog ("forest" in Norwegian, from "A Forest" by The Cure) – indeed the worst band in Bergen of Eirik's memories – released the EP "Tom Tids Tale" in 1996: four songs plus a cover of Joy Division's "The Eternal." The band split up shortly after, and the two embraced the idea of an acoustic duo, though back home nobody thought it could work.

So they headed all the way to London to play a few festivals: it was the summer of 1998, and aside from their two guitars they had nothing else – which is how they landed on the name: the Kings of Convenience. The American independent label from Athens, Kindercore, took notice of them and produced their first, self-titled LP, released only for the US and Canadian markets: many of those songs would resurface the following year on the band's first official release, Quiet Is The New Loud (2001), produced by Ken Nelson, the man behind Gomez's first two albums and Coldplay's first three, to name just a few.

Quiet Is The New Loud, released in 2001, found itself right in the middle of the whirlwind of the new acoustic movement, already set in motion by some of the duo's contemporaries such as Belle & Sebastian, Turin Brakes, Travis, I Am a Kloot, Badly Drawn Boy, but also, on the other side of the ocean, Elliott Smith. The year after its release saw the arrival of Beck's "Sea Change," Iron & Wine's "The Creek Drank The Cradle" and The Decemberists' "Castaways And Cutouts" – all artists who, in that period, raised acoustic instrumentation as their banner of identity.

The new acoustic movement is yet another label through which people tried to pin down one of the many revivals set off during the 1990s: after grunge and britpop, artists went back to picking up acoustic guitars, and naturally the comparisons with the most famous duo of the 1960s, Simon & Garfunkel, came pouring in. An obvious comparison, almost as obvious as the one between Oasis and their Liverpudlian elder counterparts, the Beatles. Too bad that Eirik admits he's never listened to a full album by the famous American duo, that he considers Joao Gilberto practically his only musical influence, and that the songs he works on with Erlend, in their purest form, "share the structure of a classic '90s pop tune."

"How much longer till the chorus?" "How much longer till the verse?" These were the kinds of questions that came up while writing them... "Kings Of Convenience are influenced by loop-based music, by sampling," Eirik continues. "The guitars in our songs are repetitive – a band like Stereolab, for instance, was a huge inspiration for us." Erlend, on the other hand, in one of the last interviews promoting Peace And Love, recalls that in that early period figures like José González, Badly Drawn Boy and Belle & Sebastian were attempting similar things, and that keeping a two-guitar band going is far harder than a normal one: "How many kids who play two guitars in their living room end up on stage with the exact same lineup?" he remarks, before concluding: "Back then, there was a whole wave of people around us who didn't want to be loud. I saw a lot of artists who managed to grab people's attention without playing hard. We were just very lucky that a bigger label trusted us and let us keep working quietly, just as we were."

A band that mattered a great deal to Erlend (while Eirik never cared for them) is precisely Belle & Sebastian. He happened to see them for the first time in 1997 in London and was blown away: "They managed to be powerful without playing loud, it was all down to the way they made music together. Back then I liked much noisier bands, like Ride and My Bloody Valentine, but in a sense Belle & Sebastian healed me. I realized that music can stay calm and still be great."

From their earlier stint with Skog, the two carried over a few songs, originally in Norwegian, but they didn't work once it came to blending their two voices on the vowel sounds – the difference in pronunciation, owing to their two different dialects, made it impossible to reach the same perfect harmony they got in English. One of those first songs in their mother tongue was probably "Winning A Battle, Losing The War," the opening track of their debut album. The two voices sing in harmony together, and the song slowly builds, telling of a love that isn't returned: "Even though I'll never need her / Even though she only brings me pain." Then the drums kick in, along with an electric arpeggio, and we're already at the second song, which seems like the flip side of the first, even if the unhappy outcome stays the same. The drums open up, quickly setting the tempo, and an acoustic riff introduces "Toxic Girl," “È intossicata da sé stessa/ Ogni giorno si fa vedere con qualcun altro/ E ogni notte bacia qualche ragazzo nuovo/ Ma mai tu”, sings Eirik, who handles lead vocals on almost every song. Erlend recalls that he would have liked to be the lead singer himself, but that singing and playing at the same time, for the length of an entire show, was trickier for him than for his friend.

"Singing Softly To Me" creeps in stealthily, with a trumpet marking out the melody and an enveloping rhythm coming from the plucked guitar strings, like a bossa-blues hybrid. Traces of Black music surface here and there throughout the songs, whether drawn from Brazilian bossa nova or from soul music, blending into a unique sound that the two manage to reproduce on each of their four albums. "I Don't Know What I Can Save You From" is probably the record's most famous tune, and it would work in any arrangement; it opens like this: “Mi hai chiamato dopo mezzanotte/ Saranno passati tre anni dall’ultima volta che abbiamo parlato/ Ho cercato lentamente di riportare/ L’immagine del tuo viso dai ricordi così vecchi/ Ho provato così tanto a rintracciarli/ Ma non ho colto la metà di ciò che era andato storto”. It's no surprise, then, that one of Erlend's favorite songs is Paul Simon's "50 Ways To Leave Your Lover." The melodic line and the simple riff played over the C chord are instantly catchy and worthy of the other Paul, the knighted one, as is the cello solo that opens the ending, which dissolves into a mantra built on the repeated title words, resting over the nylon strings of Eirik's acoustic.

"Failure" leans closer to Elliott Smith, the Smith of "Either/Or" (1997), and the lyrics – we're fairly sure this was one of the Norwegian-language tracks – grew out of the duo's early failures and disappointments, probably musical ones: “Il fallimento è sempre il modo migliore per imparare/ Ripercorrere i tuoi passi fino a quando sai/ Di non aver paura che le tue ferite guariscano”.

The album's production leans more toward Nick Drake's first two records, especially "Bryter Layter" (1970), than toward Simon & Garfunkel's, with its use of brushed drums, played mainly by Erlend, and strings that never overwhelm but always stay in service of the vocals and the guitar arpeggios, and above all, songs written with great care and performed as if the two of them were relaxing in their living room, all without ever losing the maniacal precision of the playing.

"The Girl From Back Then" opens with the two of them chatting, then someone asks if they're recording, and the guitar comes in with a repetitive progression over which Eirik sings the same verse twice, right up to the tongue-twister: "Now that I know that / I didn't know, I didn't know." A piano mysteriously creeps forward, one note at a time, carrying us away from that girl/boy who caused so much heartache, all within two and a half minutes – and it's not hard to catch a whiff of one of those Beatles-esque jokes, like "Wild Honey Pie" or "Her Majesty." "Leaning Against The Wall" has the flavor of bossa nova from its very first pluck, a guitar painting the riff that threads between the first two brief verses, then the second voice enters, describing the person the narrator has in front of them, “Incroci le braccia/ E non dici bugie/ Mille pensieri corrono/ Nella mia mente/ Mille parole di cui non ho bisogno/ Non ho mai pensato che tu potessi fare questo” – and the speaker, as the title suggests, is leaning against a wall so as not to collapse from heartbreak. For some, "The Weight Of My Words" resembles Oasis's "Wonderwall," a kinship that's hard to verify, though it remains the only track where the arrangement feels slightly overloaded relative to the song's structure, already weighed down with sadness by its minor chords.

Kings Of Convenience's lyrics frame fleeting moments, carving out a small slice of other people's everyday lives, when those unexpected instants arrive and every situation takes on a thousand meanings – but never the one you wished for. “E poi inizio ad aspettare i suoi passi/ Che si sentono nelle scale/ Entrare nella stanza e lasciare la sua borsa/ Facendomi tutti i tipi di domande banali/ Fingendo una vita quotidiana che non abbiamo”, the central part of "Little Kids" bursts in between the first and last verse, where the narrator walks through a park where some children are playing; the scene is painted like a watercolor, and the piano underscores the monotony of the character's movements, repeated day after day: it's not his relationship that will save him, because it's devoid of love.

In one of his recent interviews for the latest album, Peace And Love (2021), Erlend recalls that back when they made their first record, they were genuinely preoccupied with figuring out what it meant to be a "young Norwegian man". Eirik had lost his father at the age of seven and had grown up with a stepfather who wasn't particularly interested in his adolescence. Neither of them, then, had had much guidance through the ordinary existential doubts that grip people their age. At twenty-two, they already felt like adults: "We were very serious, unfortunately too serious, for such a young age".

The last three tracks on Quiet Is The New Loud slow things down, the words becoming ever more whispered, as if Eirik and Erlend didn't want to disturb too much, even though they're determined to close out their debut album, and to do it the best way possible. "Summer On The Westhill" is wrapped in the dimension of a journey, “Ora so che c’è un mondo oltre/ Il piccolo posto da cui venivo/ Mi sento a casa qui in mezzo al nulla”, sings Eirik, and the song fades into words, introduced by hiccuping harmonics and repeated: "Per favore nuvola dell'oceano/ Che non ci sia una tempesta sulla traversata sottostante". Erlend recounts that Eirik wrote the lyrics while traveling by bus from Glasgow to Newcastle, after a show: “He was about to take the ferry from Newcastle to Bergen, it took 27 hours and there had been a lot of waves. So, at the end of the song, he recites a small, quiet prayer for a safe journey”. “The Passenger” è un lento blues notturno suonato in minore e pizzicando in brasiliano solo tre corde, entriamo ancora in un territorio sonoro non identificato: una bossa tinta di nero? Il narratore è spaventato da un visitatore inaspettato e mentre la chitarra tesse ossessivamente il riff, l’ultima criptica strofa continua a girarci in testa, “Se solo tu ed io potessimo fidarci/ L’un l’altro attraverso questo/ Allora insieme potremmo/ Scoprire chi è il nemico”.

The closing track, "Parallel Lines", opens with a classical guitar in a minor key that, while still in standard tuning, recalls some of the sonic solutions of Nick Drake's "Pink Moon" (1972) — perhaps it's the whispered piano notes, or Eirik's voice climbing up the melody. The second guitar bursts in with a meticulously executed passage — there's nothing improvised about the Kings' music — and serves as a bridge into the finale: “Linee parallele, si muovono così velocemente/ Verso lo stesso punto/ L’infinito è tanto vicino quanto lontano”. Then, from the piano, a repeated pair of notes emerges, while a faint melody mysteriously traces a point on the horizon.

There's a single of "Winning A Battle, Losing The War" featuring an unreleased track, "Envoy", built around piano and even more rarefied than the other songs on the album. It's followed by a-ha's "Manhattan Skyline", which strips away the original's synth-rock epic grandeur in favour of a veiled saudade, a longing for a place one wishes to visit or revisit. On the "Failure" single, meanwhile, two covers appear: Joy Division's "The Eternal", already included on Skog's only EP, here turned into lo-fi indie rock, all guitars and voices steeped in sadness with only the occasional electric roar, and Tom Petty's "Free Fallin'", performed live, as often happens at the end of their shows, when everyone feels like singing along.

A few months after the success of the debut album comes Versus, a set of remixes of the songs from that record, curated by Erlend with contributions from various groups and DJs: enjoyable and intense, just like its older sibling. Magazines like Pitchfork and NME, however, panned it. Even before that, in truth, the Norwegian duo hadn't been spared criticism for being bland, musically repetitive, and overly earnest in their lyrics. As always, it's a matter of which side of the coin you choose to look at, and of grasping the broad strokes of what the project was actually offering. Twenty years on from those harsh reviews, one thing is certain: the songs have stood the test of time, the shows are still packed, and accusing the pair of being commercial or opportunistic seems almost farcical, given that these two 46-year-old men have only four albums behind them, plus this remix record.

"I Don't Know What I Can Save You From" from Versus is reworked by another Norwegian group in vogue at the time, Röyksopp, opening with crackling sounds, as if someone had given a spin to the propeller of some ancient video game: these are the sounds of twenty years ago. Röyksopp released their debut album, "Melody A.M.", in 2001 (Erlend provides vocals on "Poor Leno" and "Remind Me"), and in England, given its considerable success, some even talked about a Bergen Wave. "A ridiculous label", according to the then twenty-seven-year-old Mikal Telle, the deus ex machina of the Norwegian musical resurgence and founder of Tellé Records, the label that had already given a platform to both the Kings and Röyksopp, only to then see them become superstars across the globe. What the label's bands had in common was an independent approach, a greater focus on networking and word-of-mouth reputation rather than the backing of major labels, and a low-key, melancholic tone, whether it was electronic dance music or conventional guitar-based pop.

The international success of the Kings and Röyksopp gave that entire scene a huge boost of confidence and helped fuel a new wave of artists and labels (does anyone remember Sondre Lerche?). Not just in Norway, but across all of Scandinavia — in neighbouring Sweden too, where artists like José González, Tallest Man On Earth and Jens Lekman would soon emerge.

"The Weight Of My Words" is reworked twice over: an instrumental version closes the album, courtesy of Four Tet (who also produced the entire record), the father of folktronica, the blend of folk and electronic music that took hold in the early 2000s (also known as laptop folk). The song is dismantled and rebuilt as if it were a cubist work, and we almost prefer it this way, rather than buried under the strings of the original version. "The Girl From Back Then" rides on a remix by Riton, the English DJ and producer who was just making his debut that very year (and who would later rack up big hits somewhere between house and kraut-rock), cloaking it in a dreamlike atmosphere, which, given the lyrics lost in thin air and the tongue-twisting chorus, it rather deserves. "Gold For The Price Of Silver" (co-produced with Erot) sounds as funky as Groove Armada on a late-summer evening: the song is previously unreleased and the only one not featured on the debut album. On the remix of "Little Kids", Daniel Hunt, frontman of Ladytron, takes the unease that in the original arises from the contrast between the music's apparent childlike peace and the rawness of the lyrics, and amplifies it with a suffocating organ, turning it into a Dario Argento-style nightmare.

"Leaning Against The Wall", reworked by Evil Tordivel, moves between a pop fanfare and a soul band that wouldn't look out of place in one of those restaurants at the edge of Douglas Adams' universe. Who is Evil Tordivel? One of the flagship artists of the Norwegian label Ellet Records (itself an offshoot of the aforementioned Tellé Records) from the turn of the millennium — give 2004's "A Fine Young Man" a listen to find out what could be recorded in a bedroom almost twenty years ago. "Failure" is handled by Alfie, a Manchester band whose first records were produced by Twisted Nerve Records, the label Badly Drawn Boy founded with Andy Votel in 1997. Another figure (check out the album "All Ten Fingers", 2002) who, on Versus, dresses up "Winning A Battle, Losing The War" with sounds somewhere between John Cage and Brian Eno, unravelling it at the end with an unlikely, yet spot-on, piano swing.

It could be the story of thousands of bands around the world: two friends start playing together, form a band, write their own songs and become famous; in the shortest time possible they get covered in every possible stereotype of sex, drugs and rock'n'roll, egos take over, and in the end they're no longer as close as they were at the start. Erlend and Eirik have set aside most of these clichés, building a relationship grounded in their own needs rather than in any notion of fame and money. Essentially, they decide to make records only when they feel like it, taking all the time they need and waiting for each other.

Quiet Is The New Loud sells 200,000 copies worldwide, and the pair tour half of Europe as an acoustic duo. You'd expect the second album to follow quickly, but the new release doesn't arrive until three years later. In the meantime, Erlend is absorbed in his first solo project, Unrest (2003), and tours the European club scene as a DJ, while Eirik is focused on finishing his degree in Psychology. So the two of them are hardly stressed about the charts, yet with their second album they manage to strengthen their success all the same, reaching a much wider audience.

Riot On An Empty Street (2004) — a riot in the middle of an empty street — heads towards poppier horizons, in the noblest sense of the word. Erlend himself admits that the album was pushed hard during the final mastering stage. "It's a much softer, more commercial record. It jumps out of the speakers more", he recalls. In the video for "I'd Rather Dance With You", it's Erlend himself who plays a bespectacled nerd teaching his own personal brand of swing to a class of ballet dancers, and the song instantly becomes one of the songs of the summer, topping MTV Europe's list of best music videos of 2004, alongside the other single, "Misread". That would turn out to be the song many will forever associate with the Norwegian duo, a blend of swing and bossa nova built on an irresistible piano riff, one that would go on to play through the speakers of coffee shops and bookstores the world over.

Both songs reveal a more polished production: joining the duo's team is Davide Bertolini, who would become, to all intents and purposes, the third King. Originally an oboist, then a sound engineer and producer, the Italian landed in Bergen to work on a trip-hop album in 1999 and ended up staying to live there. By chance, one evening he met Eirik while playing electric double bass in the electronic music vocal duo he was part of at the time. They lost touch and ran into each other again some time later, when he and Erlend went to his studio to try out "Misread". "They grabbed two microphones, the guitars, and I was in the corner with the double bass", Bertolini recalls, "I recorded everything onto the computer. That album's biggest success came together just like that, on the very first take". And what a success it was: the album would sell 400,000 copies, double its predecessor's total; in Italy it reached number three and stayed on the charts for nine months.

Bertolini accompanies them on bass and double bass for a good half of the album, while Erlend and Eirik handle guitars, piano, drums, banjo and even trumpet: the range of instruments used grows alongside the strings, which remain a constant presence but never take over. Every sound is carefully calibrated, just like the lyrics and the arrangements, which are fuller and more elaborate, even if, admittedly, the bare-bones guitar duets of the debut had more courage to them. Many will see growth in all of this; others will see a mere ploy to reach a wider audience — but still, we'd add, one built on excellent songs.

The third single released is "Know-How", which opens mysteriously over a guitar riff strummed in a Neil Young style, with Eirik informing us that he's "riding this know-how/ Never been here before", referring to his state of mind, as if he were a passenger inside his own body. Leslie Feist (already known for her work with Broken Social Scene) steps in for the revealing finale: “Cosa c’è da sapere?/ Tutto questo è quello che è/ Tu ed io da soli/ Pura semplicità”, she repeats, carried by the sparse chords of a piano that morph into a web of sound, as often happens elsewhere on the album; in "Sorry Or Please", for instance, where a piano opens up, and if Elliott Smith's thin voice were to come in, it wouldn't surprise us one bit.

Feist returns on “The Build Up”, this time duetting with Erlend: a rarefied atmosphere frames the cryptic lyrics in which her voice speeds up, followed by a sudden burst of drums: “La trottola fece un suono/ Come un treno attraverso la valle/ Evanescente, oh così silenzioso/ Ma costante finché non passò”. “She'd been a fan of ours for several years, and she wrote us letters,” Erlend recalls about Feist, “in the third one she included a demo and we thought: 'Wow, this is incredibly good'. So we invited her to Bergen to record. She was pretty happy to do it, but I think we were even happier,” he admits.

Track one on the tracklist is “Homesick”: it seems that opening every new album with a song sung together from start to finish has become something of a running game (it was already the case with “Winning A Battle, Losing The War” on Quiet Is The New Loud, and the experiment would be repeated again on Declaration Of Dependence (2009) with “24-25” and on Peace Or Love (2021) with “Rumours”.

We read it as the two of them greeting whoever is starting out on the journey into their musical world, and here one could open a debate on how many people still listen to an album in order from start to finish, perhaps poring over the lyrics or the credits. Do Kings of Convenience know their audience, or are they flying blind, just following their own instinct... It's another matter to wonder how calculated it is to open the second album with a track that's pure Simon & Garfunkel, when on the first record the references to the American duo were scarce and hyped up by the press out of all proportion, and if you add in the lines that echo here and there, recalling Paul Simon's lyrics (searching boxes underneath the counter), the whole thing starts to look very deliberately planned.

“Surprised Ice” comes from the first album, and we can't quite work out why it was left off, but it's just as well, because 45/50 minutes is a fair amount of time to ask of a listener – any more would feel intrusive. “Cayman Island”, on the other hand, is the sister song to “Summer On The Westhill”: the dimension of travel returns, this time with the loved one on a tropical island, and we picture Eirik singing it with a little smile, the smile of someone who knew it would be a wonderful experience: “Se solo potessero vedere/ Se solo fossero stati qui/ Capirebbero”. “Love Is No Big Truth” leans toward soul, albeit more white than black; at certain points it feels as if Whitest Boy Alive, Erlend's parallel band, are peeking into the recording room, yet there's nothing electronic about it – just an insistent kick drum, small electric guitar figures and a banjo work together to build a folk-styled techno song.

“Live Long” is an allegory about living intensely, with a trumpet accompanying it and a rhythm once again closer to black music. “Stay Out Of Trouble” is a folk song with a waltz-like cadence, carried by a cello and viola riff that wouldn't have been out of place with Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young: once again, it's the end of a relationship taking shape between the lines Eirik sings with irony “Resta fuori dai guai/ Resta in contatto/ Search di non pensare troppo a me”, he concludes in the song.

The lyrics are generally more elaborate than on the first album, and “Misread” is the clearest example, carrying its ambiguity right through to the end. Are they friends? Will the two of them end up together or not, the ones who appear in the song? And inside it there's one of those lines that's hard to forget: “How come nobody told me until now/ The loneliest people/ Are the ones who have always told the truth/ The ones who made a difference/ By enduring indifference”.

Speaking of the lyric-writing phase, Erlend admits that at the time he kept coming back to “69 Love Songs” by Magnetic Fields: “It's an astonishing record, but then I couldn't really digest the follow-up, titled 'i'. At that same time I was trying to stop writing all these songs that start with I. It's a classic songwriting problem, there are too many songs that start with I and the point of view is always the same. You have to think about how to use words, how can I describe something in a way other than saying: 'I looked at you?'. I love the directness of the songwriting on '69 Love Songs', I'm a huge fan of that way of writing, whereas Eirik is much more metaphorical”.

It takes a long time to write the songs and leave the bad ideas at the start of the process. When we decide a song is finished, it's destined for release

(Eirik Glambek Bøe)

The duo performed sporadically between 2005 and 2007 across Europe and North and South America, slowly piecing together new songs during soundchecks. “Boat Behind”, for instance, was conceived in a venue in Bari normally used as a boxing ring, and it would become one of the two singles from the new album Declaration Of Dependence (2009), alongside the bossa nova “Mrs Cold”, in which some hear echoes of Jack Johnson. The bizarre locations where they played shows around the world inspired a flurry of new material, so much so that, during a concert in Mexico in March 2007, they announced they already had enough songs for a third album and began recording it, splitting time between Mexico, Bergen and the Esagono Studio in Rubiera, in the province of Reggio Emilia, home town of their producer Davide Bertolini.

Five years after Riot On Empty Street, in September 2009, Declaration Of Dependence was released. As for the title, Eirik points out that the dependence in question is mainly the emotional one on Erlend, and that their relationship has grown, on one hand preserving a great deal of personal independence, and on the other carrying forward that strange connection that makes the sum of their abilities essential to the band's existence. It's hard for Eirik to find a balance, because Erlend sets aside many songs for his parallel projects: “It's like being the husband of an unfaithful wife, she's having an affair outside the home and it causes an endless battle in our marriage. Since 2004 my main job has been working on this album, unlike Erlend. I've felt like the wife who stays home”.

Erlend, already after the first Kings of Convenience record, launched a solo career with the heavily electronic Unrest (2003), and at the same time, setting aside acoustic instruments, pursued the Whitest Boy Alive project, a band formed between Germany and Norway in 2001, which would make its debut with “Dream” in 2006, followed in 2009 by Rules. On the duo's scant output, he admits: “You write music about the things in your life, like meeting people and building relationships; if your life is just sitting in a recording studio, obviously it's not going to be very exciting, right?”. Another good reason is the strictness of the method they apply to each other whenever they get together with new material: they normally play each other their sketches and choose together which ones to pursue, although for Declaration Of Dependence it was different, Eirik recalls, admitting that “we helped each other finish ideas or lines”.

Declaration Of Dependence doesn't follow the pop path laid out by the previous album, and does away with any kind of percussion: voices and guitars return to duetting, with little else: “The most rhythmic pop record of all time that gets by without percussion or drums”, is how Erlend describes it, adding: “Our ultimate goal is to get as much texture and music as possible out of just two guitars and two voices. The idea is to do the most with very limited means”.

The lyrics push the lyricism further, also tackling some “political” themes. “This time it's not just stories about a boy and his poor heart, there are definitely some songs that are more topical”, Erlend explains further. The catchy “Rule My World” could be sung by She & Him and be about love, but instead the words demand answers about religious fanaticism: “Io parlo prima di pensare/ Tu spari prima di sapere/ Chi è nella tua linea di fuoco/ Quindi in qualche modo siamo uguali/ Stiamo causando dolore alla gente/ Ma io mi alzo e mi prendo la colpa/ Tu ti affanni a negare”. And the conclusion is bitter: “How come when they kill it's a crime, [and] when one kills it's justice?”.

The same rhythmic approach can be found in “Peacetime Resistance”, one of three tracks (along with the two singles already mentioned above) featuring bass, played by producer Davide Bertolini, as well as a viola, which mainly handles the riff, similar to the one in “Boat Behind”. With “My Ship Isn't Pretty” we briefly return to the rarefied Elliott Smith of “2:45 am”; the song moves as if someone were speaking to us, telling a story – “I ragazzi oggi graffitano sui muri/ Nelle strade di notte/ Nei sobborghi di città senza nome/ È distruzione o solo una protesta silenziosa/ Contro la solitudine?”.

"Freedom And Its Owner" once again pays tribute to Eirik's passion for bossa nova, and its lyrics reference Plato's allegory of the cave: “Mostra qualcosa a qualcuno/ Che ha scelto di vivere tutta la sua vita in una caverna/ Alzerà le braccia per proteggere i suoi occhi dall’apprendimento/ E dalla cecità a cui appartiene”. In short: we become slaves to what we don't fully understand, and this can happen with our finances or our work too; so only when we're able to manage the various aspects of the life we deal with on a regular basis can we become free. Hence the title: "The freedom and its owner", a paradox: freedom has an "owner", meaning whoever can possess (and master) whatever it is they're doing.

"Me And You" opens with a few piano notes, the rhythm driven by palm-muted guitar strums, and whether it's that crossroads at the end of the first phrase or the chorus, the feeling is of finding yourself somewhere in the neighborhood of Tracy Chapman. "Power Of Not Knowing" echoes Crosby Stills & Nash in orderly fashion, while "Riot In An Empty Street" (sharing its title with the previous album), with its bare opening riff, nods a little toward Neil Young. Like "Renegade", "Second To Numb" is built on intimate lyrics that depict states of mind, mental shifts within everyday routines that pull us back into the past, with characters from the stories on previous records making a return. Erlend observes: "I think the songs on the previous two records were less autobiographical than the new ones. On this record they're more so, partly because almost all of them were sketched out in private, not together."

"Scars On Land", repetitive and hypnotic like an electronic music loop, closes the album with a guitar marking out the time: "No chain remains unbroken, every goal gets forgotten."

Declaration Of Dependence receives good reviews, better than those for the previous record, even if it won't match its sales figures or the popularity generated by the singles (partly thanks to the use of music videos, which in 2004 were still riding high in MTV's media whirlwind, but by 2009 had already been overshadowed by the endless possibilities of the internet). As Erlend suggests, they've been lucky from the start because the idea of running a band with two guitars and practically just vocal parts never went out of style. Had their sound been full of references to the times they were living through, it could have ended up dated. "It's so easy to talk about production, to decide whether there'll be electronic or acoustic sounds - for me it's just an arbitrary choice, you walk into a studio and go 'oh, there's a synthesizer, so let's use it!' There's nothing more behind it, and of course every rock band starts using synths after two albums. It's not that interesting to talk about," Erlend explains. "Take Jens Lekman, for example... When I heard his music in 2004 ('When I Said I Want To Be Your Dog', ed.) I immediately recognized that this guy had written songs while walking home after a night out on Saturday. It must have been at least an hour's walk, and he'd sing to himself, then record them once he got home. That's how they're born, and so it doesn't matter whether they sound soul, reggae, pop or whatever..."

It will take a full 12 years to reach a new chapter for Kings Of Convenience. Throughout the 2010s, the two will only appear together sporadically. The shows for the Declaration Of Dependence tour will continue until 2010, after which Erlend will be the more active of the two, juggling countless projects, largely developed in Syracuse, Sicily, where he has lived permanently since 2012. Thanks to his solo career and collaborations with local musicians from the group La Comitiva, he will also discover the treasures of Italy's musical past. In 2013, in the square outside Syracuse's cathedral, he will film the video for "Una ragazza in due" with his friend Eirik, a 1965 song by Giganti. The duo will then embark on a handful of tour dates without presenting any new material, splitting their shows into a first half alone with guitars and a second half joined by Davide Bartolini on bass, Craig Farr on drums and Ugo Santangelo on guitar - a band careful not to disturb the imposed quiet, yet able to energize their shows in a way that had never happened before.

Also in 2013, Erlend will release "La prima estate", an Italian-language single with a vintage feel, closer to Whitest Boy Alive than to Kings, drifting between quirky 70s soul-style touches and nods to Italian musical tradition of the 60s. He will return to his hometown, where he will produce the albums "Hest" (2011) and "Six Months Is A Long Time" (2013) for the Bergen band Kakkmaddafakka, an energetic indie-rock outfit that emerged from the "New Bergen Wave", a label coined by the Norwegian press to revive the tag already used in the late 90s and early 2000s to identify successful bands like Kings Of Convenience.

In 2014, Erlend releases his second solo album, "Legao", recorded in Reykjavík with Hjálmar (an Icelandic reggae group), preceded by the single "Garota", with a video shot in Seoul. A year later he records a cover of Bruno Martino's "Estate" for the documentary "Peninsula", a journey of exploration from north to south along the peninsula's coastline, in the company of some of Italy's best surfers.

His musical wanderings take him to Chile more than once, where he collaborates with major local musicians such as Niña Tormenta and Diego Lorenzini, in 2019 on the song "Me Voy a Valparaíso". That same year also sees the release of a few tracks with the Italian group La Comitiva: on "For The Time Being", the sole acoustic instruments, with no percussion at all to sustain the tension, produce the effect of a ride somewhere between rumba and electronic music... the past of Whitest Boy Alive resurfaces, while that of Kings Of Convenience is genuinely hard to trace. "Valdivia" is a 2020 EP featuring just one other track, "Altiplano" - two pleasant, pastoral instrumentals whose exact purpose isn't entirely clear. Better, then, is the latest effort from '21, "Lockdown Blues".

The final Whitest Boy Alive release, the single "Serious", comes out in 2020: it's their first new song in over a decade, after which they're booked to play a festival in Mexico, but due to pandemic restrictions, it never happens.

Erlend and Sebastian Maschat, drummer of the Whitest Boy Alive, finding themselves with no choice but to spend a stretch of time at the El Ganzo hotel in San José del Cabo, Mexico, decide to enlist other musicians to record solo material for both of them. A few new tracks emerge, along with others reworked from previously shelved ideas dating back twenty years. Erlend, for instance, had tried to record "Price" with Eirik for Kings Of Convenience, and later with the Sicilian trio La Comitiva, without achieving satisfying results.

"Quarantine A El Ganzo" (2020) is the result of those weeks in Mexico: a fun, lopsided record, with songs that sound like demos somewhere between Belle & Sebastian ("Wedding Song", "Bad Influences"), bossa nova ("Butterflies") and more jazz-leaning territory, like "Within A Dream". "Keycard", meanwhile, would be perfect for She & Him, and "Quarantime"... well, at least with one song Erlend reminds us he's one half of Kings.

Unlike Erlend, Eirik will never leave Bergen, except for Kings shows - those in 2013 and those in 2015, when they embark on a tour to play Quiet Is The New Loud in full, with a set featuring two 15-minute breaks, during which the Norwegian duo will take part in short interviews in English.

In Bergen, Eirik carries on with his life alongside his three children and wife, teaching psychology and devoting himself to just one side musical project, unlike his bandmate, who is perpetually immersed in countless collaborations. Eirik reunites with some of the same members of Skog, the worst band in Bergen, with whom he had taken his first musical steps, to record an album. Kommode debut with Analog Dance Music in 2017, an electro-pop album in which it's not hard to detect, beneath the polished arrangements, one of the two pulsing souls of Kings Of Convenience.

The latest Kings Of Convenience work, Peace Or Love, comes out in June 2021, accompanied by a tour that brings them back to familiar territory to greet fans and friends. It's been 20 years since Quiet Is The New Loud, and the duo's attitude hasn't changed much. "Over the last 24 years, we've performed as Kings Of Convenience three months a year and we're still going. Take a band like The Smiths. It's a shame I can't go see them, but they made a ton of music in a very short span of time and did a lot of touring, and they probably ended up hating each other because they were together 10 months a year. For music fans, it's nicer to know your band is enjoying itself," says Erlend. And Eirik continues: "I think that's one of the reasons why, since 2004, we haven't had a manager. It was pretty clear that his intentions or ambitions were completely different from ours. He wanted us to be successful and make money within 12 months, whereas I wanted it to be enjoyable and healthy for as long as I could keep enjoying it. I think any manager would hate working for us, because we'd say no to 80% of the requests that come in and we'd be very slow to answer any email. But for me, keeping the joy and the love for what I do is an important factor."

The record drags on from 2016 right up to today, with Erlend and Eirik recording songs in different places, and almost every time the result fails to convince them, until, as Erlend tells it, "I got tired of not being convinced, so I had to take a longer break": he won't meet up with his friend again for a year. Davide Bertolini, their producer, after listening to the recorded material, suggests carefully picking out the magic moments from their sessions: "I'm not hearing the special, chaotic, interesting, strange things that make me curious." The two then dive back into searching for those moments, setting aside the idea of perfect takes and returning to the early versions of the songs, marked by just the right balance of passion and technique.

With Canadian singer Leslie Feist, with whom they had already collaborated on Riot On An Empty Street, they organize a session at Erlend's place in Bergen, trying to record something, and despite everything being very improvised, the endeavor pays off. "When we're with her, we both want to do our best, because we really enjoy working together," Erlend reveals. The rarefied "Love Is A Lonely Thing" comes from that session: Erlend had tried it out with his Italian band, La Comitiva, without being convinced by it. "Catholic Country" is also with Feist, though the melody and arrangement were actually born a few years earlier in a jam with The Staves (three English sisters with a country bent) at the People Festival in Berlin. Spurred on by how well these recordings turned out, the duo then decided to keep going with a few tracks they hadn't been sure about, and just before the pandemic hit, they finally found themselves holding something good enough to put forward for a new record.

The eleven tracks are in exactly the style we've come to expect from the pair. Had they put out an album a year, along with live records and compilations, over the past 21 years, we'd surely be sick of them by now; instead, it's intriguing to hear this fourth new batch of songs, bare and essential, arriving right after the viral storm of this decade that forced millions of people to rethink their lives. The two of them have said since the start of their career that staying calm could still amount to quite a racket. On Peace And Love, in under 45 minutes, we hear "Rocky Trail", the single built on a viola riff with hands slapping out the rhythm over the chords, the bossa nova "Angel", originally recorded in Chile in 2016, "Catholic Country" with drums played by Erlend, and "Fever", which even features a drum machine. Both admit they worried about that choice: "Will people kill us? Will they stop liking us?" Erlend wonders, though the real issue lies in the line: "Guidando in giro sul tuo scooter nel periodo natalizio in abiti funky"... it's not clear those words belong to the poetic canon the Kings usually shape their lyrics around: "It's much more prosaic, it's a much more everyday kind of thought," they admit.

"È vero, sono più saggio ora di quando avevo ventun anni/ è vero, ho meno tempo ora di quando avevo ventuno anni", the two sing on the closing track, "Washing Machine". All that's left is to hope they keep doling out their songs sparingly, marking time however they see fit. "Compared to when we were 22, we're now people who've had a lot of experiences and been through a lot," Erlend explains, "for better or worse, we have a lot to say. There's more to sing about as you get older, because all your friendships grow deeper and the things that happen demand to become poetry."

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