Meet Hollow Ship, the Swedish psychedelic band behind a song you may have heard without knowing it.
Eric Leventhal, who hosts Psychedelic Psaturday as DJ Kaigem, was watching a college football game Saturday night when a vaguely familiar psych groove he thought he had heard before carried the broadcast into a commercial break. It was bumper music, and he was determined to figure out what song it was. He found it. “Magic Mountain” by Hollow Ship, a band from Gothenburg, Sweden.
It comes from their debut album, Future Remains, released April 3, 2020 on the Swedish label PNKSLM Recordings. The band formed in 2019 and put out a 7-inch single, “We Were Kings,” that same year. It grew out of loose improvisations between singer and guitarist Thomas Frank and guitarist Vincent Vensal, with a rhythm section joining as the songs took shape.
The album was produced by the band with Mattias Glavå, the Gothenburg producer known for his work with fellow Swedish psych band Dungen. Most of it was recorded to an eight-track tape machine, and you can hear it. The sound is warm and bottom heavy, and every instrument gets room to breathe. The band describes its music as early British psych mixed with funky afro-rock, and that’s a great combo.
“Magic Mountain” is track five. One reviewer called it a “behemoth prog romp.” It’s built on a clean, tight riff, and it grooves hard.
Somebody else noticed too. On Spotify, “Magic Mountain” has passed nine million streams, while the rest of the album sits in the hundreds of thousands. Somewhere along the way it landed on a playlist that found it a big audience.
The timing was rough. Future Remains came out as the pandemic hit, and the band had to cancel its touring plans. It still drew praise from Prog, Shindig! and Raven Sings the Blues, and a cult following grew anyway.
If you caught it going into a commercial break and wondered what it was, now you know. We’re adding the whole album to the Acid Flashback library, so you’ll hear more. Turn it up.
