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 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. “So let me say a little something that’s been long overdue,” Almqvist sings on the second verse of “Roll Out the Red Carpet.” “Tried to forget about us, it’s impossible for you.” If the speech feels a bit misplaced, given that we’re currently flush with fresh Hives music, it nonetheless feels honest; bravado and ego are important components of good rock and roll after all, and a band like the Hives can indulge both without consequence. They’re so firmly themselves, in sound and aesthetic and presentation, that no rock outfit exists today that compares to them. Lyrics like these come off more as genial boasting than as displays of mood-souring narcissism. Besides: considering the record’s swath of cultural critiques, the “you” Almqvist addresses here could just as well be the very same folks he’s grown so tired of on “Enough Is Enough.” Even the personal moments built into songs like “Roll Out the Red Carpet,” and “They Can’t Hear the Music”—a broad account of the existential value that Almqvist and his bandmates derive from rock music–strike anarchic chords. The journey taken on “They Can’t Hear the Music” is about a self-determining liberation. Almqvist characterizes the track’s core feeling as something of a lifeline on the first verse: “Since I was a kid I knew it / This was my way to get through it / Turn it down but it’s still loud in me.” He seems to be speaking of his younger self: what rock meant to him as a twenty-something, and to his brother, lead guitarist Niklas Almqvist, and the rest of the band: rhythm guitarist Mikael Karlsson, drummer Christian Grahn, current bassist Johan Gustafsson, and even former bassist Mattias Bernvall (who retired for his health in 2013.) Rock isn’t simply what they do. It isn’t even what they “are.” It’s what they embody. The Hives Forever Forever The Hives wraps that combination of biography and social outrage into a royal package, capped by reminders that maybe we won’t find ourselves waiting for new Hives music for very long in the future. “One more time, this time with feeling,” Almqvist chants on the bridge of “They Can’t Hear the Music.” Every Hives album is stuffed with feeling, of course, like the “bow down to the mayor of nothing” singalong in “Paint a Picture,” but the feeling on The Hives Forever Forever The Hives is gritty; they’re here to stay, and since they’re staying here, they’re going to make a grand,