Review: Viagra Boys — Viagr Aboys

Viagra Boys
Viagr Aboys
Shrimptech Enterprises
Street: 04.25.2025
Viagra Boys = (Parquet Courts + Idles) x (Death Grips + Connor O’Malley)

I recently read a Pitchfork review of the Viagra Boys’s third album, Cave World. The reviewer didn’t love it, saying the record was “not particularly interested in convincing the uninitiated” with its lyrical content.

That’s true. However, Sebastian Murphy and the rest of the Stockholm-based post-punk band have never been interested in “convincing the uninitiated.” If they were, they wouldn’t create a record as emotional, dumb and wind instrument-driven as their fourth album, Viagr Aboys.

More sonically ambitious than Cave World, Viagr Aboys maintains the concussed disaffectedness that has characterized the band since they first broke out in 2018 with the single “Sports.” Starting off with headbanger “Man Made of Meat,” Murphy rattles off a few humorous, perception-related one-liners: “I’m subscribed to your mom’s OnlyFans / I spend five bucks a month to get pictures of her flappy giblets” and “I stand outside of the McDonald’s / Flexing my muscles ‘til I explode.” 

Driven by Henrik Höckert’s bass, “Man Made of Meat” quickly launches into track 2, “The Bog Body,” where Höckert and guitarists Oskar Carls and Linus Hillborg run alongside Murphy into a song about his frustration about his significant other’s frustration with his infatuation with a hot, ancient corpse exhumed from a bog. A little lost? That’s fine — just stop paying attention.

After two songs that very much evoke the forward-pushing feeling of classic Viagra Boys bangers (think “Baby Criminal” or “Ain’t Nice”) the band turns towards the other side of its discography with the paranoid “Uno II,” named for (and somewhat from the perspective of) Murphy’s dentally-challenged greyhound.

“Uno II” may be the most engaging song of the album, featuring nervous percussion from Tor Sjödén, ominous synth from Elias Jungqvist, and Carls taking a turn as flautist and saxophonist. Murphy perseverates about “feel[ing] like such a bitch / when [he] talk[s] about Swedish politics” and waking up in places he doesn’t understand. “Uno II”’s gritty, uncomfortable sound hearkens to other Viagra Boys songs like “Just Like You” and “The Cognitive Trade-Off Hypothesis” while spinning it into something both more sinister and more polished.

The most surprising turn in the album comes in the form of two songs: “Medicine for Horses” and “River King.” Slow, emotional and breathy, the songs remind you that while Murphy and co.’s slack-jawed, whippet-sucking characters still feel things between rants, conspiracies and misadventures.

“Life is hard, and it’s harder when you seem to like it hard, or / At least when your subconscious seems to like it hard,” laments Murphy on “Medicine for Horses,” a song surprisingly not about Ivermectin but instead about popped dreams, the beauty of wild horses and a desire for a body that might outlast the current hellscape of late capitalism. Closing the album, Murphy’s vocals and Carls’s clarinet make the closest thing the band has ever come to a love song in the mournful “River King”: “Lookin’ at you / Everything feels easy now, and / Lookin’ at you feels easy” while the faint sound of people dining echoes in the background.

The rest of the songs on the album can be divided into three categories: punk rock, whingy and alone or genuinely emotional. “Pyramid of Health” steps into a throaty country twang while echoing Beck’s “Loser” and “Dirtyboyz” returns to the heavy strings of the first two songs on the album and ends with an Elvis impression. 

If you like Viagra Boys, you’ll like Viagr Aboys. The band still plays with their favorite themes of the body, masculinity, and drugs while turning a heavy focus to the idea of perceiving and being perceived. Songs like “Uno II” and “Man Made of Meat” have a classic Viagra Boys flavor while “Medicine for Horses” adds a new, unusually-earnest third. If we’re to believe Murphy and co., they don’t care too much if you like this song. However, let’s watch the music video for “Man Made of Meat,” which features a drunken Murphy breaking a wine bottle in an art gallery. Spectators view the accident as modern art and Murphy is pushed by a gallery owner to create increasingly derivative art, culminating in a crude painting of a horse wearing a hat with a wine bottle on its back. Engaging with the surge in popularity the band’s seen since the release of its last album, the video tips the album’s hand: being perceived is exhausting, and Viagra Boys would rather do their thing than have you think too much about it.

If you like it, you’ll like it. If you don’t, the Viagra Boys probably don’t care. Give it a listen — I hope to see you in the drive-thru lane! —Peter Eckhardt

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