I have Scandinavian DNA. Well, at least some of my DNA is from Scandinavia, 47% according to Ancestry.ca. The northern Sami Lands of Finland and Sweden are my heritage, but I don’t speak a word of their languages. However, I am fascinated by their use of Å, Ä, and Ö. These three letters are in addition to the same 26 letters in the English language that I use every day.

My maternal grandfather was Otto Järf, and there are those funny tiny dots over the letter a which becomes ä. My maternal grandmother was from the Pääjärvi family, lots of dots going on there. They were both from the Korpilombolo, Norrbotten area in Sweden.

All of this brings me around in a circuitous way to the word KÅRP. The name of a Swedish band with a dot over the letter A or Å. I have been listening to KÅRP plenty since they released the single It Looks Bad in 2021 on an EP titled Kris. Kris is the Swedish word for crisis. It Looks Bad was the first song ushering in a trio of EPs that explore three stages of the apocalypse: Chaos, Silence, and New World Order.

Kårp started working on their apocalyptic-themed EP trilogy before Covid was a thing. Kris handled subjects like climate change, capitalism and right-wing extremists. The second EP is a reflection on what happens right after a downfall.

“The idea with Perfect Order was to reflect the feeling of what happens right after a downfall. We call it the silence and the absence of all fixed values. The carpet is being torn away under our feet in a place of total nihilism—a time when there is no history or future.

The topic of an apocalypse is somewhat dark just by the very nature of what it represents. music that carries Perfect Order to our ears is, pardon the interruption, in perfect order. Kårp gives us hope that we can get through the dark times. “The idea with Perfect Order was to reflect the feeling of what happens right after a downfall. We call it the silence and the absence of all fixed values. The carpet is being torn away under our feet in a place of total nihilism—a moment in time where there is no history or future. The EP is called Perfect Order because every now and then, we believe that there is a short moment of perfection. We’ve been hoping it could be a nice place to be in, at least for about 15 minutes. There is nothing to do there except to possibly beat a rhythm on a dirty trash can and hope that people start dancing.”

So there we have it, a song of hope. En sång av hopp, I managed to get another letter in with the cute little dot over it. Bra musik reser sig ur apokalypsen och lämnar oss med hopp om en bättre värld framåt.

Follow KÅRP on social media Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube) and find the band’s music on Bandcamp, SoundCloud, Spotify and Apple Music.

KÅRP present their music through the Swedish indie label Smuggler.