Girl Scout

Swedish four-piece Girl Scout deliver a road-honed, high-energy brand of indie rock that echoes the approach of Snail Mail and Big Thief. That direction sits far removed from the group’s initial immersion in jazz theory long before they issued the EPs Real Life Human Garbage in 2023 and Headache in 2024 or secured support slots with Alvvays.

The band’s foundation lies in coursework at Stockholm’s Royal Academy of Music, where guitarists Emma Jansson and Viktor Spasov first crossed paths while studying jazz theory. Sweden’s long-standing role as a cradle of pop craftsmanship exposed them to successive waves of Western songwriters and producers, leading the pair to book regular performances of Burt Bacharach and Beatles material reinterpreted through jazz lenses. Their shared pull toward 21st-century rock acts ranging from the Strokes to the 1975—a direction uncommon inside Sweden—prompted them to begin writing original songs in that style. The lineup quickly grew with the addition of fellow student Evelina Arvidsson Ekland on bass and Spasov’s acquaintance Per Lindberg on drums. An early rehearsal produced skeletal versions of roughly six tracks, yet the COVID-19 pandemic soon halted momentum for Girl Scout as it did for countless other acts in 2020.

The members pressed ahead by refining home recordings, which drew the attention of Stockholm’s Made Records. The label issued the band’s debut singles “Do You Remember Sally Moore?” and “All the Time and Everywhere” in 2022; those tracks, along with additional material, formed the 2023 EP Real Life Human Garbage. Their unpolished yet inviting sound, paired with camcorder-shot videos, generated attention and earned them opening dates for Coach Party across the United Kingdom. Seven months later the quartet returned with the EP Granny Music—its title drawn from John Lennon’s well-known remark about Paul McCartney—which broadened their palette through jazz-inflected passages on “Millionaire” and Springsteen-tinged moments on “Mothers and Fathers.” The third EP, Headache, followed in November 2024, arriving after the group landed its most prominent live opportunity to date: supporting Alvvays on a European run.