Strikkland: ‘There are enough bitter middle-aged men in the world’

Strikkland are easy to misread if you mistake humour for distance. Henrik Johansson can deliver brutal lyrics while smiling, appear in a red feather boa, play with national flags or deliberately puncture the visual severity traditionally associated with EBM, but none of that suggests embarrassment about the genre. Quite the opposite. The joke works because the attachment underneath it is genuine. They are not standing outside EBM making fun of its conventions; they know those conventions intimately enough to interfere with them.

I first saw the Gothenburg duo at E-Only in 2024 and again this year on the much larger Waldbühne at Nocturnal Culture Night. At NCN, something became particularly clear: humour had stopped feeling like something happening around the songs and had become part of Strikkland’s performance language itself. Hard electronic structures, Henrik’s forceful delivery and the physical directness of EBM remained intact, while gestures, costumes and irony continually destabilised the expectation that seriousness must look solemn.

Their second album, “Hommage”, makes that tension especially interesting. It openly acknowledges the music that formed Henrik and Henric, while its production deliberately returns to hardware, physical studio equipment and recording practices associated with an earlier era. Yet Strikkland have little interest in turning EBM into heritage preservation. For them, tradition is useful precisely when it can still be disturbed. We spoke about growing into a band after fifty, refusing genre uniforms, why limitation can generate creativity, the ethics of AI, the strange authority of old symbols, and what happens when two people who take EBM very seriously refuse to behave as though seriousness requires a permanent scowl.

Strikkland interview

Karo: I first saw you at E-Only in 2024 and then again on the much larger Waldbühne at NCN this year. What struck me at NCN was how much more clearly humour had become part of the performance language itself. When did you realise that humour could be structural to Strikkland rather than merely something happening between songs?

Henrik: We have always had humour as an important element of what Strikkland is all about. We started the band on impulse and as a fun thing to do. The lyrics are often conjured up at the same time as we are in the studio creating new songs. My texts often tend to drift towards dark stories about space, death, fantasy and the absurd. The humour you get from seeing the band live is something we have developed throughout all the time we have been on stage. We have fun, and that creates what we deliver.

Henric: We realised early on that two old geezers would only look ridiculous if we tried to act tougher or darker than we actually are. Besides, there are plenty of bands already biting heads off chickens or dressing up in full combat gear on stage. It has all been done before, and it really didn’t seem like an option for us.

Our appearance and the way we behave also evolved from criticism in Sweden after our first live shows in the early days: “Their music is half-decent, but they aren’t a real EBM band because they don’t look or behave like one.” We kind of turned that against the critics, embraced it even more and made it our thing.

Karo: At NCN you told me that when you started the band, already approaching your fifties, you briefly considered becoming the “gothiest” band possible before deciding that pretending to be something you were not would be ridiculous. Did starting Strikkland later in life actually give you a kind of freedom younger bands sometimes lack, because you had less need to prove that you belonged?

Henrik: Absolutely! Also, later in life you have so many more musical influences to choose from and try to implement into your own songs. Starting a band later in life also means you can afford to have a band and go places to play live without starving and sleeping in the car on the way there. We are doing something today that you thought impossible when you were young.

Henric: Being close to 50 when you start a band certainly provides more freedom. Our ambition was never to release records or perform live, but when possibilities opened up, we jumped for it. Speaking for myself, I got a chance to do what I wanted to do in my teens but never got the chance to do. At 50, you aren’t as afraid of criticism or about what others might think as you are at 16 or 17. That helped a lot.

Karo: EBM has accumulated a very strict visual and behavioural vocabulary: severity, discipline, confrontation, often a certain cultivated lack of humour. You clearly love the genre, but you also interfere with those conventions constantly. Which parts of EBM do you take completely seriously, and which parts do you think deserve to be laughed at?

Henrik: We never laugh at EBM, but we think we can involve irony and humour in the genre and have a laugh at certain aspects of life. Humour and art are always found in the contrasts. I mostly write quite dark lyrics, but we present them with a lot of smiles, humour and dance.

Henric: EBM has been a huge part of my life since the 1980s, so it is something I take very seriously. I do laugh at some of the rigidity coming from certain corners of the fanbase, though. Come on, loosen up and dance while you still can. Have fun. At least laugh a little. There are enough bitter middle-aged men in the world, and I don’t want to become one of them.

Karo: That is also why “Hommage” interests me. It is explicitly a tribute to the music that formed you, but homage can easily become imitation. How do you honour an artistic language without treating it as something that should remain frozen in the period when you first discovered it?

Henrik: The tribute to the EBM bands we grew up with is always there when we make music. In “Hommage”, it is in the basslines, the sounds, the technology and the artwork. I am a curious person, so I constantly look for new music and new bands to listen to. The EBM genre, and Strikkland, keep finding new ways without letting go of the legacy of the bands of the 80s.

Henric: Apart from a handful of gems from bands like Kraftwerk, DAF, Nitzer Ebb, Front 242 and a few others which can’t be topped, EBM and electronic music have evolved a lot. In my playlists there are rarely any songs older than two or three years. You can still hear where it is coming from, but it has evolved. If we stick to what we grew up with, there would be stagnation and the genre would surely die out. But thanks to artists like SIIE, Emmon, Plastikstrom and many others, it is still interesting. So I would rather risk going outside the standard formula and at least try to contribute to keeping EBM alive, both musically and visually.

Karo: You made “Hommage” deliberately with classic studio equipment, hardware synthesizers and drum machines, and you were very explicit about not using AI. Is that primarily an ethical position, an aesthetic one, or did you simply want the limitations of those tools to become part of the composition?

Henric: AI has no place in art. Full stop. For both creative and ethical reasons. When it comes to using hardware versus working “in the box”, it is purely a workflow decision. The tactility of turning knobs and pushing buttons works better for me than using plugins. We are also privileged enough to get to work together with Hans Olsson at Svenska Grammofonstudion in Gothenburg, which is both a studio and a “synthesizer museum”. It would be stupid not to use all of those classic machines if you can. Our first album, “Bodypop”, was mixed there on an SSL 4000E console, so when we got the chance to mix “Hommage” at Hansa in Berlin on their SSL console, of course we took the plunge. And of course we did some additional recordings there as well. I mean, who could resist playing the very same Steinway grand piano that Martin Gore posed in his jocks next to?

Karo: There is an interesting contradiction there: Strikkland describe themselves as expanding the borders of EBM, yet “Hommage” deliberately looks backwards in terms of production practice. Can technological limitation actually be more progressive than unlimited technological possibility?

Henrik: Well, maybe in a way every EBM band today is expanding the borders of EBM? To stay in the genre, you have to remain within the frame agreed upon, regardless of what technology you use. But it gets more interesting if you drift away towards the border and sometimes cross it, bringing in other influences and expressions. That’s the way music has always evolved.

Henric: For me, limitation sparks creativity. There is a certain number of available channels on a physical mixing console. On a computer, you can have hundreds. There are also limitations to hardware synthesizers and effects, and all of this forces me to be creative. As mentioned before, this is a workflow that suits me. With that said, most of our songs start out “in the box” because it is convenient.

Karo: Henric writes the music and programming while Henrik handles vocals and lyrics. With such a clear division, where does the personality of a Strikkland song emerge? Does the music arrive with a character already inside it, or can the vocal idea fundamentally alter what Henric thought he had written?

Henrik: Often we start with a bassline that Henric has created and then build it together from that point. I get inspiration for the lyrics and write them at the same time as Henric starts to develop the music. When both of us feel ready, we fuse it all together. This is a fast process, so we are very much in line with what kind of music we want to produce.

Henric: Let’s put it this way: when Henrik enters the studio, I might have 20 loops that I have worked on for six months, with basslines, drums and maybe a melody ready. If Henrik says, “Great! But can we change this or that?”, that loop goes into the bin. But if he stops, shuts up and starts to write text immediately, I know it is a keeper. Then we combine that idea into a draft by making a rough arrangement, tweaking the text, tweaking the music and finally recording it. When we have enough tracks for an album, we take it to Hans and re-record everything. So, to answer your question, the music inspires the vocals and the vocals give direction to the final piece of music. Neither would be the same without the other.

Karo: At NCN, Henrik changed clothes, exaggerated gestures and played with Swedish and German symbols and declarations of friendship. In a genre that has historically borrowed heavily from militarised imagery, does humour give you a way to use those symbols without allowing them to retain all of their old authority?

Henrik: When I go to see a band live, I want to be entertained. When I am on stage, I want to entertain and have a good time! To joke around and interact with the audience and get a warm response elates me. I love the contrast of delivering hard-hitting music and brutal lyrics with a smile on my face and prancing around with a red feather boa. So yes, it is absolutely a way to deflate the power of symbols of power.

Henric: Personally, I think it is important to reclaim symbols like national flags from fascists and extremists and use them in a positive way. We don’t hide behind humour and irony, but instead use them as tools for communication. Our message is clear. We don’t accept fascists, Nazis or totalitarian regimes, we support Ukraine’s fight for freedom and we advocate free speech. But maybe we have chosen a “lighter approach” to convey this than other bands, mainly because the darker image doesn’t suit us on a personal level.

Karo: What I particularly liked was that none of this reduced the concert to parody because the musical foundation remained genuinely hard. Do you consciously protect that balance, making sure the joke never becomes an excuse for musical weakness?

Henrik: When we make our music, we never implement humour to start with. Okay, some lyrics are rather absurd and some sound effects we add for fun, but we want our music to be serious and taken seriously. It is mostly when we play live that we joke around.

Henric: Some people have clearly written us off as a parody act. No question about that! But either they haven’t seen us perform live or they haven’t understood what we are doing. Irony is a tough nut to crack for some, and others lack humour. One thing is certain, though. We would never release or perform anything that we ourselves thought was weak, and we put a lot of work into our music.

Karo: You worked with Hans Olsson at Svenska Grammofonstudion and Hansa Studios on “Hommage”. Did working in spaces carrying so much recording history make you more conscious of tradition, or was the important thing precisely to forget the mythology once you were actually inside the studio?

Henric: It took a while for it to sink in once we were at Hansa. We were actually sitting at the same mixing console that was used to make some of the greatest albums of my youth?! Insane! But once that feeling disappeared, it was just another day in the studio and we did our thing together with Hans.

Henrik: Hans Olsson suggested mixing the album at Hansa, and I honestly was totally unaware of the history of this studio. Henric was jumping up and down with excitement. We were there for three days and it finally dawned on me how cool it was! There we could use the same machines and instruments that our heroes used.

Karo: The larger stage at NCN seemed to suit you surprisingly well. Some electronic acts compensate for space by simply making every gesture bigger; with Strikkland, the additional room seemed to expose more of the interaction between you. Has playing larger stages changed the way you understand what the visual side of the band can do?

Henric: We are not that used to playing larger stages. Apart from Subkultfestivalen in Sweden and WGT, most of our shows prior to NCN have been in front of a maximum of 200 to 300 people. I think there is a lot of room for visual improvement when playing the larger stages. We are just two guys and a couple of machines, so in order to put on even better shows we probably need some additional features on stage to make an impact. But we also don’t want to hide behind video walls, smoke and lasers. Guess it’s time to put on our thinking caps and find a Strikkland solution to the problem. But yeah, visuals are important to us, from album covers to how we appear on stage.

Henrik: What Henric said.

Karo: “Hommage” looked deliberately towards the music that made you. Looking ahead, what would be the opposite gesture? Is there something in the EBM tradition, perhaps even something you personally love, that Strikkland now need to leave behind in order to find out what the band can become next?

Henrik: I can’t think of a thing in the EBM tradition that we want to leave behind. When we create new songs, all kinds of new influences colour the final result. Last time we met, the song rotated towards techno music, so who knows? I always get new ideas every time I listen to metal music. There you find my inspiration and trigger to do new stuff for Strikkland. But with that said, there will never be a guitar on stage with us. Body music forever!

Henric: I don’t know, to be honest. There are most certainly no holy cows as far as Strikkland is concerned. What we would love to happen is to do even more shows in mainland Europe, and if that means we will have to tweak things one way or another, so be it. If it turns out we have to bite heads off chickens or perform in Pickelhauben in order to get booked, it might be worth a shot! I mean, a lot of people do judge books by the cover, and it would be sad to miss out because of that. We will see what happens and what we come up with.

About Strikkland

Strikkland are an electronic body music duo from Gothenburg, Sweden, consisting of Henric Ceder, responsible for music and programming, and Henrik Johansson, responsible for vocals and lyrics. Their first documented release, “Predatorial Right”, appeared on 27 March 2020.

Their debut full-length album, “Bodypop”, followed on 2 December 2022. The ten-track record was mixed and mastered by Hans Olsson at Svenska Grammofonstudion in Gothenburg, using an analogue SSL 4000E console; Strikkland explicitly connected that production choice to their admiration for classic EBM.

Their second full-length, “Hommage”, was released on 28 March 2025. The nine-track album was produced by Hans Olsson, with recording, mixing and mastering work carried out at Svenska Grammofonstudion in Gothenburg and Hansa Studios in Berlin. The band describe the album as a tribute both to the artists who inspired them and to older recording practices. They state that no AI was used in its production, relying instead primarily on classic studio equipment, hardware synthesizers and drum machines.