Stockholm, SE · post-punk

Viagra Boys

7 festivals played ↓

Sweaty, saxophone-wielding Swedish post-punk satire — one of the best live bands on earth right now, 'Sports' shouted by thousands.

Viagra Boys came together in Stockholm in 2015, its members drawn from other local bands including Nine, Les Big Byrd, Pig Eyes, Nitad and Neu-Ronz. Sebastian Murphy, the only foreign-born member, grew up in San Rafael, California, and moved to Stockholm at seventeen to live with his aunt; raised bilingual, he worked as a tattoo artist and met his future bandmates while singing Mariah Carey's "We Belong Together" at a karaoke night.

The current lineup adds Oskar Carls on saxophone and flute, Elias Jungqvist on keyboards, Linus Hillborg on guitar, Henrik "Benke" Höckert on bass and Tor Sjödén on drums, filling out a sound that pulls post-punk together with garage rock, funk-adjacent grooves and stretches of noise.

Their songs tend to work as character sketches and send-ups of masculinity, fitness culture, conspiracy thinking and consumer life, delivered with more absurdity than moralising. The debut album Street Worms appeared in 2018 and contained "Sports," the list-song that became their calling card, and it won the band an IMPALA Album of the Year award in 2019.

Welfare Jazz followed in 2021, the last record to feature founding guitarist Benjamin Vallé, who had left the active lineup before his death later that year at 47; a deluxe edition with seven additional tracks appeared in 2022. Cave World, the band's third album, was released the same year as that reissue.

The band won the Swedish Grammis for Rock of the Year in 2023 and supported Queens of the Stone Age on tour that year. In 2025 they released Viagr Aboys through their own label, Shrimptech Enterprises. The band has become known primarily for its live shows, which are loose, physical and heavily driven by Murphy's stage presence.

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post-punk