Lazy Queen has had widespread support from i.e. KERRANG, CLASH, Rock Sound, and several spins from Jack Saunders over at BBC Radio 1. They toured UK twice after the pandemic and it’s immediate, it’s urgent, it impatiently demands your attention. They now follow up their EPs A Human Reaction (2022) and Growing Pains (2023) with a new album in 2026 on Icons Creating Evil Art. While we wait we get some new recordings of early material on Mixtape: Lost, Never To Be Seen Again vol. 1 , released May 30th. Founding member and vocalist Henrik García Søberg (they/them) tell us the story:

- "The mixtape is made up of a bunch of our old songs that we took down about two years ago. We re-recorded them and now we’re releasing them…. again. 

The decision to take down these tracks in the first place had in part to do with professional pride… We’ve learnt a lot since these songs first came out and we have met so many great people along the way; we’ve got the ingredients, now, to produce tracks that feel more realized and encompass the fuller scope of how they sound in our heads. 

Taking them down was also about how we relate to them, since the music is so personal and situational. So with this mixtape release it’s been important to understand what these tracks mean to us now and how now we relate to the content, perspective, emotions and experiences when so much has changed since we wrote them. 

I don’t think we were really in a place where re-recording and releasing these tracks for ourselves was on the radar, but these songs… they’re not really ours any more. Some of the folks who listen to us and come to our shows, they reached out when we took them down, and one individual in particular took the time to explain to us what one of the songs, Apocalipstick, meant to them. 

We always say, if the show or the song makes just one person feel less alone, then we’ve made it… we’ve done what we set out to do. And given what that track means to just one person, we had to get it back out there… for them, and also for us. 

So, we've re-recorded some songs off of the Drift and A Sigh So Deep EPs, in addition to one unreleased track from the same period. It's been an interesting exercise to dip into old material and our approach and sound from back then. 

The process of re-recording turned out to be a real love letter to the version of myself that wrote those songs. That kid that fought so hard and got me to where I am now. We wanted to keep the more DIY and unpolished feeling of those recordings; keep the aggression while simultaneously bringing in some of the lessons learned since. Inevitably, some of the musical identity that has developed later on showed up in this process too, but we’ve tried to keep these things in balance. 

With our next project after this being our biggest one yet, it felt right to tie up some loose ends and reclaim our roots. What is coming up is quite different, and I think it’s really reflective of personal growth as much as artistic growth. There’s this tendency, sometimes, for people to weaponize growth or change to diminish or write off what came before, especially when what came before was passionate. But the themes in these songs, anger, pain, coming out, rejection, addiction, are still vitally important, even if those of us performing the songs aren’t experiencing them in the same way at the moment. Rerecording, with better technique and equipment and as better musicians, it’s a way for us to keep on playing these tracks with authenticity. "

LABEL CONTACT

Carl-Marcus Gidlöf
Head of the Snake
Icons Creating Evil Art
Råsundavägen 73, Solna, Sweden
cmg@icea.se