Dungen will release En Är För Mycket och Tusen Aldrig Nog on October 7th, 2022, via Mexican Summer. The band’s new full-length Translated to One is Too Much and a Thousand is Never Enough, is their first studio album since 2015’s Allas Sak finds Gustav Ejstes, Reine Fiske, Mattias Gustavsson, and Johan Holmegaard now decades-deep in collaborative focus and psychedelia to new heights. The album’s hypnotic lead single “Nattens Sista Strimma Ljus” (“The Night’s Last Shimmer of Light”), guitars skip like a synth pattern over a shaggy drum beat that sounds both like a late ’60s blowout and late ’80s acid house freakout. Ejstes explains the song is about “when the fun has come to an end and you want to start over” and is out now alongside a hazy video directed by Isidor Xavier Estrada Nyqvist.

The nine-track album was recorded in pieces beginning in 2017 in Gothenburg, Sweden, with producer Mattias Glavå, who last worked with Ejstes on Allas Sak. Glavå’s creative input was crucial to the record, and helped Ejstes to challenge his preconceptions of how his own music might sound. “We’d be in his studio, where he has all this amazing gear, and he’d be encouraging me to go with every weird idea and not to feel any pressure,” Ejstes says. “He would say, ‘Let’s use this rhythm box or this sample or this loop,’ and I’d be like, ‘can we do that on a Dungen record?’” Likewise, Ejstes’ bandmates—guitarist Fiske and bassist Gustavsson, in addition to drummer Holmegaard—encouraged him to push his ideas further. “It really took a lot of courage to go to the guys and play this stuff for them,” he says.

While the textures might seem unusual for a Dungen record, Ejstes insists these sounds have inspired him throughout his career—even when they haven’t seemed to. “If you take Mitch Mitchell, Public Enemy, and Swedish psych-organ player Bo Hansson, and you put that in a pot, that’s jungle for me. It’s all about the breaks,” he says. “And these layers of noise. With fuzz guitar, it’s noise under control. It’s the same with turntable scratching for me—feedback and shit, it’s all the same.”

As its title suggests, many of En Är För Mycket och Tusen Aldrig Nog’s songs find their emotional center in Ejstes’ relatively recent sobriety, marking the first album he recorded without being under the influence. “It’s groundbreaking for me,” he says. “My life has changed, drastically, in the last five years.” Like many newly sober artists, he was initially worried that his creative abilities were tied to using. “But the music is so strong in itself for me,” he says. If anything, sobriety has taken him more deeply into the music than he ever has been. “It has actually become even more trippy to experience music if you don’t take away the edges of life. It gets very real.” You can trace Ejstes’ struggles through the tracklist: “Om Det Finns Något Som Du Vill Fråga Mig” (“If There’s Something You Want to Ask Me About”), “Var Har Du Varit?” (“Where Have You Been?”, a track first released on the Self Discovery for Social Survival soundtrack and reimagined here), “Klockan Slår Den Är Mycket Nu” (“The Clock is Ticking, It’s Late”). So many of these songs bear the weight of pain, and even at their most sonically ambitious, they’re always emotionally direct.

Dungen
En Är För Mycket och Tusen Aldrig Nog
Tracklist
Mexican Summer

1. Skövde
2. Om Det Finns Något Som Du Vill Fråga Mig
3. Nattens Sista Strimma Ljus
4. Möbler
5. Höstens Färger
6. Var Har Du Varit?
7. Klockan Slår Den Är Mycket Nu
8. En Är För Mycket och Tusen Aldrig Nog
9. Om Natten

Pre order En Är För Mycket och Tusen Aldrig Nog HERE