Marching Band

With just a pair of participants, Marching Band crafts an expansive and colorful strain of Swedish pop. Residents of Linköping Erik Sunbring and Jacob Lind launched their work under the Marching Band name in 2007, issuing an EP that same year and then heading to Los Angeles months afterward to lay down a complete album. Spark Large surfaced in 2008 and drew favorable notice from Rolling Stone, which highlighted the group’s “pillowy pop,” along with broadcasters such as KCRW and NPR. Although the music attracted positive attention from reviewers, it reached a wider listenership in 2009 after multiple Marching Band tracks were placed in various television series and film soundtracks. Sunbring and Lind remained in Sweden for most of that year to prepare a follow-up release, enlisting producer Jari Haapalainen (Camera Obscura, the Concretes) for assistance. The sessions yielded a modestly darker album, Pop Cycle, issued in 2010. Their third album took shape across several years after both Sunbring and Lind relocated from Linköping, requiring them to collaborate remotely from their new homes in Berlin, Germany and Malmö, Sweden. So Much Imagine arrived in January 2014 and, containing 21 songs, ran considerably longer than their earlier releases.