If we turn a blind eye to the likes of Aqua and Whigfield, Denmark, musically speaking, is best known for Lars Ulrich, King Diamond and Volbeat.
Now, Get Your Gun are looking to add to that legacy.
Formed in 2008 by brothers Andreas and Simon Westmark, the pair’s dark and harrowing songs – which could easily be the soundtrack to a Satanic sacrifice – seem to span centuries, compositions that sound like they’ve always existed. Of course, they haven’t – their seven song debut album The Worrying Kind came out in their native country last year, and is now being unleashed upon Britain.
“We’ve been touring this album for a year and a half now,” says Andreas, “which is a big privilege, but it’s a bit weird to be releasing it so much later in England, but it’s because we do everything DIY style. So it’s a bit weird to talk about an album which, for me, is that old, especially because when you release an album, it’s already kind of done for you in some ways. I’m really proud of it, and I’m not tired of playing the songs, but I don’t want to hear it.”
Dark and foreboding, heavy yet also ethereal, Get Your Gun’s music is incredibly timeless, and the songs’ deliberately simple structures belie their incredible depth of feeling. These are emotional, existential soundscapes which stretch back all the way to the start of time.
“There’s a Danish word, ur, ” explains Andreas, “which means primeval, before the beginning of mankind, and a friend of mine calls our music ur-rock. It’s only a few chords, but it’s about trying to see how much you can get out of that. How much can you get out of just two chords? But it’s also difficult for me to talk about what I do, because I don’t always know!”
To some extent, Get Your Gun’s music comes from a place of geographical and musical isolation – it was created, like the world itself, appropriately enough, out of absence, which is what makes it sound so full.
“We didn’t know how to play when we started,” admits Andreas. “We come from this really small village, and we didn’t really relate to a lot of the day to day stuff that our schoolmates did, like football and riding scooters. It didn’t really speak to us. We didn’t know that many people who played music so we just started together. We had our first show in the nearest big town, Aalborg, and afterwards someone came up and said ‘You sound very much like The Birthday Party’ and we had no idea what they were talking about. We had internet, but it wasn’t that fast, so we didn’t really know that much music. It was just this mystical thing to us and it was a revelation that there were other bands who people thought we sounded like. We just found our own path!”
As dark as Get Your Gun’s music is – and no, their name isn’t a Marilyn Manson reference, in case you were wondering – Andreas insists that he’s not as gloomy as his songs would suggest. There’s a difference between who he is and the music he makes, but that he’s more than happy to embrace those doom-laden tendencies.
“I think it’s important to make dark music,” he says. “I hear a lot of people say that it’s only dark and it’s only angry, and I don’t think that at all, but for me it was about accepting that you have these sides, that there is this part of you. It’s a really big driving force for me – and I think it should be for everyone. It’s not something that we try to hide. I’ve always been attracted to literature from Dostoevsky or whoever – this really existential stuff where it’s super dark – and reading stuff like that and watching movies about those subjects always tells me something more about myself. It’s more revealing.”
Get Your Gun’s The Worrying Kind is out now through Empty Tape. For more information, visit their Facebook page.
