Forever Is a Pleasure on The Hives Forever Forever The Hives
Just as the music industry desperately needs a resurgence of anti-authority garage rock to counterbalance corporatized pop bullshit, the Hives’ second album in as many years captures the raw, chafing urgency of what it’s like to be alive right now.

Just as the music industry desperately needs a resurgence of anti-authority garage rock to counterbalance corporatized pop bullshit, the entire planet needs The Hives Forever Forever The Hives. No album released to date in 2025 better captures the raw, chafing urgency of what it’s like to be alive right now, as the United States’ plunge into mouth-breathing Christofascist authoritarianism, both inevitable and ahead of schedule against expectation, caps off a worldwide embrace of strongman leadership buttressed by crony morons and fueled by subcultures whose loudest voices are only in the game to profit from oppression, cruelty, and hatred. A fullthroated “fuck you” is required.
For a lad whose sobriquet is “Howlin’,” Pelle Almqvist, the Hives’ cofounder and frankly one of modern rock’s most compelling frontmen since 2000, spends most of The Hives Forever Forever The Hives barking. He’s pissed. “Everyone is a little fucking bitch, and I’m getting sick and tired of this,” Almqvist shouts on “Enough Is Enough,” the record’s kickoff ditty, instantly setting the tone for the 11 remaining songs (plus two filler tracks). No matter your latitude and longitude, the sentiment applies to you. Even Almqvist and his fellow Swedes can’t escape humanity’s trend towards autocratic madness; apparently fed up with comedy treating the country’s non-interventionist policy as a punchline, its center-right government submitted a NATO application in 2022, with the support of the Sweden Democrats—who are, contrary to English apprehension of the word, right-wing.
The Hives are, in short, specially qualified as a garage-rock band to produce a state of the union of sorts, which also functions as a statement of purpose and self-reflection. If the album’s title alone isn’t a hint, The Hives Forever Forever The Hives fixates partly on legacy; it’s their second album released in as many years, following an 11-year gap between their fifth record (2012’s Lex Hives) and sixth (2023’s The Death of Randy Fitzsimmons), and yet Almqvist and the gang take time out of their overarching agenda of razzing idiot tyrants and spoiled billionaire man-children to acknowledge that long absence of new material.