The Nomads

Hailing from Stockholm, the Nomads distinguished themselves among garage rock revivalists through the sheer force of their live shows and an unusually broad set of influences that reached past typical 1960s acts into 1970s punk, heavy metal, rockabilly, and blues. Their debut effort arrived as a raw cover of the Sonics’ “Psycho,” a self-financed 45 the band manufactured in an edition of 500 copies in 1981, only to scrap 50 of them because of pressing flaws. A subsequent single delivered an incendiary treatment of the Strangeloves’ “Night Time,” after which their initial mini-album, Where the Wolf Bane Blooms, brought greater notice. During 1984 the group completed its first European tour and attracted U.S. interest via the Outburst LP. Although they successfully expanded their palette—adding horns to a version of Jeff Conolly’s “She Pays the Rent” and deploying a deliberately cheap synthesizer on the Suicide-influenced “My Deadly Game”—the Nomads have never attracted more than a modest cult audience in the States, perhaps because they have issued relatively few original compositions. Even so, they have produced a body of music that remains genuinely thrilling, if not especially groundbreaking.