First Aid Kit - "Palomino" : Swedish sisters pump-up the volume

With first Aid Kit’s debut EP and album - 2008’s Drunken Trees and 2010’s The Big Black And The Blue - Johanna and Klara Soderberg mastered the art of melancholy old-time American folk. At the time of that first EP’s release, they were 17 and 15 years old respectively but their songs were truly world-weary and forlorn, drenched in an ageless, ancient sorrow.

Almost a decade-and-a-half on from that first ER first Aid Kit’s profile has risen greatly. Both 2012’s second record, The Lion's Roar, and its 2014 follow-­up Stay Gold, went Platinum in Sweden and Gold in the UK, while 2018’s Ruins went Gold and Silver. And while the sisters’ songs have remained rooted in that sound, they’ve not been afraid to push the boundaries. That’s evident on this fifth studio album from the very off. Opener Out Of My Head starts tentatively, but after just over half a minute, the first Aid Kit’s trademark tender, mournful strains give way to a very different sound - a rush and roar of electronics and beats that could, without too much work by the right remixer, viably be turned into a euphoric club anthem.

It’s a pattern that’s also repeated by the next song, Angel, though that one eventually bursts into a joyous horn-led crescendo.

The heart at the center of both is still broken, though, and it’s at that intersection of unbridled joy and abject despair where these 11 songs, all of which were produced by fellow Swede Daniel Bengston, exist.

It’s an album that, by some weird inverse metric, also simultaneously recasts and reaffirms first Aid Kit’s approach. Whereas before they sounded much older than their ages, now their songs have been injected with an extra dose of youthful vitality. There is, for example, a jaunty levity in The Last One’s light country twang and resplendent strings, as well as in the almost whimsical melody underpinning A Feeling That Never Came. 

Still, there are remnants of their jaded youth in the boldly titled Wild Horses II, a nostalgic road trip that references the classic Rolling Stones song, and in the wistful solemnity of 29 Palms Highway. They may be older, and these songs might be more upbeat and modem, but First Aid Kit’s solemn pain remains as authentic as it always was.