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Photo by Lamia Karic

Girl Scout is one of those bands you take pride in recommending, hoping your music loving friends grasp just how much they needed this Nordic three piece band with melodies that make you punch the air. On their debut album, Brink, Girl Scout really nails a fun, pop-rock-fueled existential vibe that is both lyrically pertinent and optimistic – ‘Keeper’" aces this energy – while feeling sonically expansive. It's a familiar sound, but one with a compelling touch of quickness that marinates with each listen. We’ve been trying to get the lowdown on Girl Scout for a minute, we were ecstatic when they gave us a video call to discuss the best road advice ever given, tacos recipe, and so much more:

OnesToWatch: My first question with a band always is, who would win in a fight emotionally and physically? 


Girl Scout: …

I'm joking. 

Girl Scout: Oh, we’re going for it. Emma would probably be the emotional winner. Physically, it would be Pat. Chevin has more of… the world to describe it in Swedish would be Sieg. But in English it would be durable? Tough? Scrappy? Just getting punched down all the time and still getting up. Those are the worst people to fight, when you’ve clearly won but they just keep coming. 

What is the origin story of the band? 


Emma: Originally, it was me and my classmate, Victor, who started a duo. It was a vocal guitar duo. It was a way to just play and get some cash. We studied jazz, so we started doing jazz covers, it was just background music music, really. And then we started playing more songs that we liked, and then we started writing music together. For a second it was a folky, acoustic thing, but we quite quickly grew tired of that. We wanted to do something that felt more like us – a broader, bigger sound. So we decided to start a band. Pat joined the band, and we had another classmate called Alina, who was on board originally. It was during COVID when we started playing together. In Sweden, it wasn't as rigid as it was in the U.S., so the guidelines were more to stay in a small circle. Because we were studying at the time and school got shut down, we started the band around the same time. It was all we did. We would go to the rehearsal space once a week and play and record. It didn't start out as a very ambitious project.
It was purely fun. All of us had studied jazz and it felt really refreshing to revert back to what made music fun and interesting growing up. That was the jumping off point of what we wanted to do musically. And then we fell into our management because we had an Instagram and would post small snippets of songs and then he found us through there. Then it became a real, actual mechanism of an actual band. We've released three demos and now we're releasing an album. 

I feel like there's a whole new class of bands that were all formed during the pandemic. I can't wait for the thesis paper in 20 years about how without the pandemic, we wouldn't have this generation of amazing bands. Since you guys studied jazz, I will keep my Ornette Coleman references to a minimum, but that was my thesis when I was in school – Ornette Coleman as American foreign policy. And since you're within a small group of people in the world that would get that reference, I had to throw it out there. 


Girl Scout: That's very funny. 

If everything goes to plan with this album, where does that take you guys? What does that mean for you individually? 


Girl Scout: It's nice to earn a living and all that, but I don't think we have any set goals with the band of wanting to be “this” big, or we want to play “those” stages or anything like that. It's more just that we want to keep going. We want to keep playing live. We want to keep making music. Hopefully, if the album goes well, then that just gives us more opportunities to keep going. It would be nice to afford a sound tech to travel with us and stuff. That would be great. 

I love that answer. That would be a great first step. 


Girl Scout: Obviously, we didn't start out thinking that something like this was possible, when we started the band. But I think now, the ambition that's been raised over time is making it what we do, and doing our absolute best in making it as good as we can. That drives us forward. We’re learning as we go and seeing what we can do better and what makes this closer to the vision in your head. That’s what we're always striving to evolve, it’s not so much scale-oriented dreams. It's more of, how do we make this as good as we can make it? How do we keep it fun for us and interesting and feel like we're moving somewhere different? 

Love that. What is the musical process like for you guys? Do you individually bring ideas and different pieces of song? Do you get in a room and jam? Do you all contribute in different ways at different times? Is there a sort of method to how you guys write? 

Girl Scout: Yeah, all of the above. The process very much varies, from one song to the next. Sometimes Emma brings in an idea and we start working on that. Sometimes we're just in the rehearsal space and things happen. Emma writes all the lyrics, at least for this album. She’s brought in quite a few pretty complete songs, too. But the process is still very collaborative. 

Emma, since you're the principal songwriter, let’s touch on lyrics – do you have a methodology? Is it diaristic journaling, the feelings coming in and out? 

Emma: Primarily, it's a diary. But writing is just something I do in my day-to-day life. I’m bad at making a routine out of it, I very much just write on my phone and do that every day. I’m not a structured enough person to have a writing session. So I just aim to do it every day and have it as my way of thinking out loud so that I never have to panic and start over and start writing again. If I do it every day, then I'm always going to have something to say and I'm always going to have some form of lyrics somewhere about something. It's very much a processing mechanism for me. I'm always trying to approach things in a way that feels interesting to me – but then, also, when you do it a lot, you become so hyper aware of your tendencies and like what kind of perspective you, like tend to write in and like how you like structure a verse or like, how many syllables and like how many, like how you rhyme it and stuff like that. So I try, like, right now I'm kind of in the process of like trying to find like, to immerse myself in like different ways of writing to kind of just, like, get more like, ways to go about it. But like in the in like the first draft stage, it's very much just like, just write this down somewhere so that you have it somewhere. 
I think that you can just, you know, there's like drafts just fucking floating around everywhere in my phone. I always love, I think, you know, the self-editing process as an artist is probably one of the most, like underdussed and most difficult things. 

So given you guys are a band, it's even more interesting how you create bodies of work.
How do you decide what makes the album? 

Girl Scout: All three of us have agreed very much of what fits and what doesn't without us having to make any ground rules. So Swedish, we agree already. We didn't have an explicit rule of thumb for any of the music, but the majority is fairly recently written. 

How many songs did you guys have to narrow down to? 

Girl Scout: If you count all the demos, 15 or 16? And there’s 13 on the album including the intro and outro. We had some songs that we have kept for a while that we basically saved for the album when doing EPs previously. I don't know if any one of those made it, but they were in the running. 

So you didn't have to edit too much. 


Girl Scout: Yeah. We would make fake album set lists every once in a while to see how it felt and what made sense. So very early on, we had a bit of an idea of where it would land. 

One last question about the album. If there’s an ideal place to listen to this album, or an ideal time of day or moment, do you guys have an idea of where this album would best be heard? 


Girl Scout: Good question. A train? 

Is this a train ripping through the Nordics or the empty space of desert Western America or just anywhere? 

Girl Scout: It would make sense if it was a train that was going somewhere in Sweden, because that's the environment that it was born out of. A train ride at night. But it's always nice to listen to music in transport. Maybe also walking through the slushy, winter snow. 

Okay, pivoting to some fun questions. You guys and your friends and family are all hungry. Which one of you can whip up a meal? And what would it be? 


Girl Scout: Emma and Pat are the culinary people here. If we were at Kevin’s place, he’d make those black bean tacos he makes so well that the rest of us love. 

Kev, spill the ingredients.

Kevin: I'm a one trick pony. Swedish people eat tacos very strangely. They have very many small bowls of different ingredients, and you have to make your taco with small spoons of all the toppings on. It's not very practical. My dish, I guess, would be my criticism against that. I just boil it down to three good components. There's the bean taco, which has a lot of salsa in it and chilies and beer. Then there's a mango salsa and guacamole. It's not that special, but it's good. 

Emma: No, but the magic about the black bean tacos, Kevin, and why you make them so well is that instead of having like 20 small plates, you've combined the different topping plates into the three key components. So you have the guac that you make with sour cream, which is sacrilegious, but then you get the sour cream in your taco and you get the guacamole. And then you have the mangoes with the chilies and the cilantro and all the vegetable things in one thing. And then you make it with salsa, too, and you have the sweetness. Then you have the beans with the chipotle paste and the beer, which is umami, so you get the salty, creamy, rich, and then you, instead of putting it inside a taco, you serve it with tortilla chips. So you don't have to make them every time. You just put three piles on your plate and then you just scoop it up with the chip. It's all the flavors, all the components, but one thing. 


My mouth is literally watering. You guys really undersold this. I'm going to ask you all individually two questions to end.
One is a non-music recommendation. So something you would recommend to a friend. It can be an activity, something to read, or watch, travel, etc. And then the second one will be a music recommendation.

Kevin: A music recommendation, we were talking about albums today.
So I'll say, since this is an American outlet, I would say Hingborn, which is a Norwegian punk band. They have an album that's crazy and insane and like nothing you've ever heard before.
It's called Soft Spot. Non-music rec, Paul Thomas Anderson's new movie. It was so funny. Really well done. 

Emma: I have a non-music rec. Cilium seed coats. This stuff is fucking incredible. They look kind of like chia seeds. When you put them in water, they get the same effect that chia seeds get. They get a gel coating. It's super high fiber content. If you put this in your smoothie or oatmeal, you'll have the cleanest shits of your entire life. It's magical. It’s incredible, especially when you're on tour. 


That was a great recommendation. 

Emma: It's a game changer, and it's great when you're on tour and you're in England and just eating brown, mysterious foods. And then my music recommendation, I'm really into a band called Frog. They have an album that's called Whatever We Probably Already Had It. And they're so good. I don't think they're touring in Europe, but I'd love to see them live, they're incredible. 


Pat: I'm going with a book recommendation. I don't know how famous it is in the U.S. but if you want to read a book and feel like shit, this is the one you go for. It's School of Night by Karl Karl Ove Knausgård. It's part of a series of books, and it's dark as fuck. I had to pause it for a couple weeks because I just felt like shit whenever I read it. But it is incredible. Really, really good. It's just complete anxiety. And then as for music, I will recommend an album by a Swedish artist called Mattias Alkberg. He's an artist who’s been around for 20 years and he's probably released like 30 albums or something.
He's insane with his productivity. He has an album called Bodensia. It’s in Swedish, but it's just incredible. I wasn't blown away when I heard it at first because I was more hoping that he would do his normal kind of punky guitar driven stuff, and this is something completely different. But I grew to see how beautiful it is. So, so good. 

Well, guys, thank you so much for chatting. 

Thank you!