Cyanide Sisters – Cyanide Sisters

Cyanide Sisters formed in Stockholm at the tail end of the 2020s — a time when a lot of indie rock was playing it safe. But these two, Christian Baringe and Daniel Jansson, brought something more unruly and unapologetically loud to the table. Christian, the punk-turned-producer, supplies the grit and the gnarl, while Daniel brings the melodic chops and emotional gravity. Together, they’ve sculpted a debut album that feels like a love letter to lost youth, slacker spirit, and the enduring power of a great, fuzzy riff.

Some albums don’t knock politely — they kick down the door, spill fuzz all over the floor, and demand your full attention. It’s a record that feels both haunted and defiant, channelling the primal noise-pop of Psychocandy-era Jesus and Mary Chain and injecting it with the garage-born weirdness of bands like The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band. The result? A glorious, unkempt mess of melody, menace, and emotional wreckage.

Let’s take a walk through the noise…

The album’s opener, ‘Kill the Light’, is an understated fuzzed out lullaby. It’s a sugar sweet 60’s pop gem swathed in perfectly restrained feedback. The kind of tune that might’ve been penned by The Shangri-Las if they’d traded in their beehives for battered Jazzmasters. Guitar’s shimmer and hiss like a distant storm, while the vocals drift in soft and sorrowful — barely there. There’s a fragility beneath the distortion that’s quietly devastating. It doesn’t try to blow the doors off; instead, it slowly dissolves them with melancholic charm. A bold move to start the album so gently, but it pays off beautifully — it sets the tone for a record that’s as much about heartache as it is about volume.

Up next ‘Get in Line’ pulls off a masterful illusion. If you only listened to its intro, you’d think you were about to get a Sonic Youth like angular art rock number. Instead, what appears out of the cloud of distortion is another pop gem. The guitars wobble and detune like they’re melting in real time, but underneath it all lies a pristine melodic core — bright, buoyant, and oddly uplifting. The verses shuffle along with a lazy coolness, vocals delivered with a detached croon that recalls early Beck or even Lou Reed on a particularly glam day. There’s a subtle tension in the rhythm — a push-pull that keeps the track teetering on the edge — but the chorus opens wide, all sunlight and grit. It’s this constant tug-of-war between chaos and clarity that gives the track its charm. Cyanide Sisters are showing their hand early: this isn’t noise for noise’s sake — it’s noise in service of something beautifully bittersweet.

Now we’re floating in more psychedelic waters. ‘All That Glitters Isn’t Gold’ is a hazy, sunshine-soaked highlight — a gauzy wash of reverb-drenched guitars and tape-warped vocals. Think early Mercury Rev if they’d grown up listening to Revolver and Loveless on repeat. There’s a woozy, slow-motion grandeur to it — like falling backwards through a kaleidoscope of paisley and feedback. The track pulses with a dream logic all its own; melodies drift in and out like forgotten nursery rhymes, and the vocals sound like they’ve been dipped in honey and left out in the sun. There’s a touch of The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band here too — that sense of something beautiful just slightly out of reach, warped at the edges by time and tape hiss. Lyrically it’s one of the most evocative on the album — all tarnished promises and decaying glamour, delivered with a shrug and a sigh. It’s one of those songs you want to get lost in completely, eyes closed, volume up, letting the reverb rinse you clean.

‘Rainbows’ is next and the band are channelling their inner Stones as they play their most psychedelic card yet. The cyclical melody is hypnotic and pulls you in. It seems like there’s very little going on — but again, that’s an illusion too. Beneath the minimal surface is a swirling undercurrent of texture and tension. The guitars chime and pulse like they’re breathing, while the bass snakes its way through the mix with a lazy menace. There’s a wooziness here, like you’ve taken a wrong turn into the Velvet Underground’s more cosmic side. It’s the kind of song that’s deceptively simple — it feels like it’s looping endlessly, but tiny details keep shifting: a ghostly harmony here, a flicker of fuzz there, subtle shifts that keep you under its spell. It captures the feeling of being stuck in a beautiful daydream you’re not quite sure you want to wake up from. And just when it feels like it might lift off into something explosive, it dissolves instead, like smoke in sunlight.

The feedback returns for ‘Stay Down Here’, another Spectoresque wall of sound track that takes that 60s aesthetic and throws Mary Chain guitars into the mix. The backing vocals are simply sumptuous — all sighs and soft harmonies, like The Ronettes floating ghostlike over a sea of distortion. There’s a romantic desperation at the heart of this one, buried under squalls of fuzz and echo, like someone yelling “don’t go” into a hurricane. The production is massive — layers upon layers that somehow never swamp the melody. It’s like Cyanide Sisters are building their own cathedral of reverb, brick by brick, crash by crash. The drumbeat is primal and pounding, the guitars both caress and crush, and through it all those backing vocals shimmer like mirages. It’s a modern doo-wop meltdown, soaked in heartbreak and amplifier buzz — and it’s absolutely glorious.

It’s a moody, darker atmosphere next with ‘Trash Can’. The delicious descending chords create an understated vibe that gives the vocals much more room to breathe. This one’s less about attack and more about space — that glorious negative space where the tension simmers quietly. There’s a downtempo menace to the rhythm, something slow-burning and cynical in its bones. It’s got shades of The Velvet Underground’s Pale Blue Eyes but passed through a filter of Scandinavian gloom and post-punk grit. The vocal delivery is almost conspiratorial — close-miked, intimate, like it’s being whispered right into your ear at closing time. Lyrically, it’s loaded with imagery that’s both bleak and strangely beautiful: decay, repetition, the comfort of giving up. It’s a standout moment of restraint — a reminder that Cyanide Sisters know when to go big, and when to let the cracks speak for themselves.

‘Fat and Old’ next reminds me of Manfred Mann’s Earth Band with its spacey pop sensibilities. The distortion is dialled down here, with vocals being pushed through the tightest of compression to great effect. It feels like a transmission from some lonely satellite — distant, metallic, yet oddly warm. There’s a woozy charm to the whole thing, like it’s floating through zero gravity with only a busted keyboard and broken dreams for company. The chord progression is simple but evocative, full of melancholy wrapped in shimmer. And lyrically, it’s one of the album’s most tender punches — grappling with aging, identity, and the slow disintegration of youthful ambition. But there’s humour too, that Cyanide Sisters balance between sadness and smirk. It’s a slow dance for the disenchanted, a space-age crooner for the romantically wrecked. And despite the title, it’s one of the most emotionally youthful tracks on the record — wide-eyed and wondering, even through the fog of time.

The curtain call, and what a haunting one it is. ‘Another Winter’ is slow, swirling, and nearly ambient at points. The vocals are ghostly and distant, as if the singers already halfway gone. It doesn’t so much end the album as it dissolves it — like ice melting in the morning sun. An elegy in fuzz, echo, and frostbite. The guitar tones are fragile and skeletal, trembling over a bed of glacial synth textures and looping reverb trails. It’s less a song in the traditional sense and more a feeling — cold breath in the air, a cracked windowpane, a memory you’re not sure is yours. There’s something deeply cinematic about it too — you can almost see the closing credits rolling over grey skies and deserted streets. If Pet Sounds had a goth cousin raised on delay pedals and Scandinavian winters, it might sound something like this. Cyanide Sisters bow out not with a bang, but a shimmer, proving once again that restraint can be the most devastating instrument of all.

So, there it is — a debut album that doesn’t just arrive, it quietly infiltrates. Cyanide Sisters aren’t here to blow the roof off, they’re here to haunt the hallway afterwards. From the sugar-rush fuzz of ‘Kill the Light’ to the glacial dissolve of ‘Another Winter’, this record plays like a love letter to pop’s faded glamour and guitar music’s ghost-stained past. They’re not reinventing the wheel — they’re burying it in distortion, digging it back up, and giving it a hug.

What’s most striking is how deftly the band dances on the edge of contradiction. Every moment of noise is carefully measured, every sweet hook layered in shadow. This is an album that sounds like it was made by two men obsessed with the beauty of decay — pulling threads from The Jesus and Mary Chain’s nihilistic romance, tapping into the zoned-out wonder of The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band, and wrapping it all in a very modern, lo-fi sort of existential ache.

It’s shoegaze for the soft-hearted cynic, psychedelic pop for the broken dreamer, and indie rock for anyone who ever fell in love with a band that no one else at school had heard of. Cyanide Sisters have made a debut that feels less like a statement and more like a secret — one that’s whispered through tape hiss, buried in fuzz, and meant just for you.

So, what are you waiting for? Dim the lights. Press play. Let it all wash over you. And when it’s done? Play it again. This one’s not just worth hearing — it’s worth holding onto.

Cyanide Sisters is out now streaming in all the usual places and you can grab a digital copy over on the Cyanide Sisters Bandcamp Page.

You can follow Cyanide Sisters on social media here….

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