POM POKO
Pom Poko is a post-punk band hailing from Oslo, Norway. What makes them stand out from the rest is their ability to make sugary pop-inspired melodies with a twinge of noise and jazz influences. The band released their second album, Cheater, in February 2021. They recently released a string of tour dates in Norway and the UK. We talked to the lead singer, Ragnhild Fangel Jamtveit about the new record and their first and last show in the US before the pandemic.
Congratulations on the album Cheater. That's really exciting. How has everything been during the pandemic?
It's been weird of course, because we can't tour, so we don't really get to see that we released an album. It's just now it's out there and we don't get to play and we don't get to like see people reacting thing to it. So in that way, it's different, but it's nice as well. Yeah. It's been finished for a while and it's nice to get it out.
Did you get to tour outside of Europe for the last album?
We were in the US for one day because we left from Norway on the 12th of March or something. And we played one concert in New York and then we went backstage after we played the show and we saw the press conference with Trump saying they were closing the borders.
Oh gosh so were you able to make it back?
Yeah, we were just able to make it back with very expensive flight tickets. And we got back to the day after.
That's crazy. The one night that you did perform in New York, would you say the audience was any different than your usual in Norway?
I think the whole experience was very strange, because everyone was very scared of the virus. I think also the audience was like, should we really be here?
With your songwriting and production, would you say that a lot of it stems out of improvisation or is it more planned?
It's mostly improvising. I would say we improvise a lot and then we like to structure it afterwards.It’s a combination of improvisation and structure.
With you all trained in jazz too, that must be kind of natural to you all.
Yeah, it is. It is. That's where we met at jazz school and that's how we started making music as Pom Poko.
An article on your Bandcamp says that with Cheater, all of you kind of strove to make it a more or less frantic part of yourself. Obviously there's more control on the songs in songs like “Andrew” versus maybe ``Theme Number One”. How did you balance the loud moments with more subtle?
I don't know. It wasn't a choice we made. We just made songs that were more, either quiet or noisy. I think it just happened. That sounds very boring, but I think we never like sat down and said, we have to do more songs like that or this or that. Mainly, the songs came out of our improvisation. But we are strict with the ideas. We all have to like them to let them pass. If one person is like, no, I don't want that, then we can't do it.
How long did it take for you to make this album?
We started writing maybe two years ago in February we started making the first song. But then in 2019 we toured a lot and didn’t have the time to write as much. So we wrote most of a year ago in the spring of 2020, and then we recorded it in two weeks maybe.
Was there anything that you were listening to a lot at that time that inspired what you guys made? Or was it more just internal?
I think when we are on tour, we always listen to music that we hate and like at the same time. I think this album is a bit inspired by Nintendo games really because the guys in the band play a lot of Nintendo when we're touring. They get these Nintendo references that I really don't know, but they start saying that the album title Cheater is from a game called Mario Tennis, Mario tennis. It's a character called Waluigi, who says, you're a cheater! You're a cheater. I'm a cheater.
Do you think that there's a lot of uniformity within the Norwegian rock scene or does everyone kind of do their own thing?
Hmm, I don't know. I don't think everyone does their own thing, but we're very few people and there's a lot of music. So if you look at the number of people who are here, the music scene is quite big and what they call it diverse.