Sugar Rats
Sugar Rats is an garage-rock band out of Sweden, and this EP is their first record, being released by Bollmora Rekords. It was released in November 2022, so it took some time to show up on my radar, probably because it’s not the main genre that I listen to. But with that said, there has definitively been moments where some nice garage-rock has caught my attention in the past.
The opening track on the EP, She Was a Nazi, has me hooked pretty much straight away, with it’s tongue-in-cheek lyrics about finding and going home with a girl that turns to be exactly what the title says. I don’t know how many people have experienced that, but I could guess that it’s a pretty hard thing to ignore, even if everything else is great.
In my first iterations of this review, I wrote that that’s where the record peaked for me, and that I lacked something going forward. But, as I gave it more listens, the more the other songs started to grow on me. Sure, the opening track might still be the most instantly memorable of the EP, but the others just needed a little bit more of my time and patience. The texts have a nice mix of subjects, and are also being a bit more serious at times, and musically it hits the genre well. You Got It Coming and Backstabber is quality garage-rock with good drive and quite a bit of hate-fueled energy, and She’s the Cure has some serious the Hives-vibes in the chorus.
The Rodents in Sugar Rats, J, K and T Rodent, serves up an EP that is staying to close to the expected sound and feel of a garage-rock album. The production is gritty, the voices are gritty and the sound is definitively gritty. Not so much that it takes away anything from the songs themselves though, it lifts rather than hinders the writing and the musicianship.
I ended up liking Sugar Rats first record more than I at first thought I would, thanks to it’s grit and nice drive. It’s also great to hear that it’s not pedal to the metal all the way through the tracks, allowing for some changes in tempo. With that said, I’m sure there are fans of the genre, bigger fans than me, that would probably get even more out of this record than I did. I also think the EP-format is well fitting this time, a full-length might have needed some more diversity in the style to hold up all the way for me, but this portion-size doesn’t leave me overly stuffed in the end.