I was expecting Farveblind to make noise. So do they. But Micro Pleasures does something more rare: It makes noise with meaning. Three men in suits, a studio on Tagensvej, a distortion button, and an idea that small joys might be the only taxable income we have left. I was counting on energy. I didn't expect that I would sit with the record on the fourth listen and think that this is the year that Danish music stopped excusing itself.
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Disclaimer: Apropos Magazine received access or a review copy. As always, we share our own impressions — unfiltered.
Six stars
Back in 2022, Farveblind released the EP All Clubs Are Bastards, a record that sounded like going out dancing in safety shoes. Punk attitude, rave drums and a fist full of breakbeats. It was a band that wanted to blow up the club. At Micro Pleasures, they sound like someone who's built their own club, locked the door, invited the right guests in and set fire to the sprinkler system. The difference is not the level of ambition, because it has always been top notch. The difference is that the frenzy is now composed. Every override is wilful. Each bass has paper on itself.
That's the hardest thing to do and that's what they've done. Farveblind has gotten better without getting nicer. They have not changed direction, not found a more “mature” sound, not been to a meeting with the branding department. They've just dug into their own soil and found that there was far more in there than they may have even known. They have expanded Farveblind without diluting Farveblind. It sounds trite, and so is it until you try it.
The press material describes the record as “little glimpses of chaotic happiness in a world of apathy, fear and war,” and it's a formulation that, in other hands, could have ended up in a curated void of matcha and gratitude diaries. But it doesn't. Because the “micro pleasures” on Farveblind's plate are not the kind of joys you cultivate on a yoga mat. That's the kind of thing you commit. The cigarette. Club. The impulse. Desired. The little thing you say to yourself doesn't matter. “It's not an addiction, it's just a little pleasure.” It's a phrase I've heard people say about everything from nicotine to confrontation anxiety, and it's really the phrase the whole record is based on.
The band is Anders Norre Arendt, Jens Asger Lykkeboe Mouritzen and Magnus Pilgaard Grønnebæk. On paper, three perfectly ordinary Danish men. On stage and in the listener something much less balanced. The record was recorded in Studio Tagensvej 85G and mixed and mastered by Gustav Brunn, who among others has left his mark on the sound of Viagra Boys and Yung Lean. It's audible. There is a metallic clarity to Micro Pleasures, an edge that does not hide, but also does not cut for the sake of cutting. It's overruled with forethought. The ugliness is designed.
The album features nine out of eleven tracks. On paper an industry dinner. In practice, a collective breakdown with good sound. For the guests do not act as strategic flags in an export plan. They act as different entrances to the same universe. Elliphant draws out the pop instinct. K.Flay delivers a consumption diagnosis in deadpan. Sebastian Monti sounds like he's been standing inside the machine the whole time and is only now getting the microphone. Foreign Air makes Battle Lady-Like combat-ready. Django Django gives the ending air and reverberation. It is rare to hear features used so little decoratively and so much compositionally.
Do You with Elliphant is perhaps the record's most immediate moment, and it says something about Fareward's level that their pop number still sounds like it's slept three hours and woken up in a storage room. It's an insanely well-composed track that stands out without falling out. The reference point is not pure radio-pop, but rather Justice around Cross; that feeling that even the kicket has personality and that the melody is not a concession but a weapon. Elliphant makes the number bigger. She doesn't make it any smoother.
Battle Lady-Like sounds like Boys Noize were locked in a punk room in Berlin with three Danish men in suits and a faulty smoke alarm. Overruled without being sloppy. Ugly in the right places. There's fuzz, pressure and electrostatic aggression, but it all sits with a precision that approaches irritating. It's not noise. It's noise with a master's degree.
On Things, the record's critique of capitalism becomes almost embarrassingly concrete. K.Flay delivers a text about consumption as self-medication, and the line “Woke up feeling shitty, so I opened up my wallet” should be like a small shameful tattoo on the back of all our Dankort. It's funny because it's true. And it's ugly because it's true. The song isn't about buying things because you lack them, it's about buying things because you're missing yourself for five minutes. AirPods, socks, Amazon, TikTok, Visa statement. The whole modern dopamine chain lies there, ludicrously and eerily recognisable. Farveblind does it wisely by not making the number moralizing. They make it sound like the impulse itself: hard, restless, repetitive, stupid in that intelligent way. “My things” becomes not just a refrain, but a little possessive breakdown. An adult in the fetal position with a package-box code.
Salary Man with USERS is the hamster wheel of the plate, and that's not a metaphor. It's beat, bass and programming. Farveblind don't write about office culture; they program it. When the breakdown hits, it sounds like the very exhaustion the song describes. It's capitalism criticism as the pulse. It works because it doesn't try to explain anything. It's just trying to feel it.
The title number is the black heart of the record. Micro Pleasures with Sebastian Monti sounds like Underworld greeted by Soulwax on their way down a fire escape; the long, bodily sensation of night, asphalt and people dancing their way out of something they can't articulate. It's club music that knows what it's trying to numb. It's not trying to solve anything. It'll just keep it open for five minutes and forty-eight seconds, and when it's done, you have a faint feeling that something in your own body has shifted room temperature.
Natural Behaviour with Emmeline is the record's most open moment, almost spiritual. What is nature? What is drift? What is just bad habit of good marketing? Emmeline's vocals are haunting in the way that you can't decide whether she's comforting or warning. The bass gallops. The number lifts, spirals outward, and one suddenly begins to think of one's own calendar with a kind of sadness.
All of the Atoms with Django Django rounds off the record, and it's a great decision. After all that club, all that machine, all that bodily resistance, Micro Pleasures doesn't end with a win. It ends with air. It's a song somewhat reminiscent of Low on HEY WHAT in its spacious, existential vibe. You are left as if after a breakdown that was not your own, but which you brought home anyway.
The most impressive thing about Micro Pleasures is almost how close it all is to being too much, without ever becoming so. The plate stands right out on the edge of overstimulation, looking down. Instead of falling, it starts dancing. Every kick has an identity. Every bass figure has intention. Every synth sounds like something that is either being born or breaking. It's producer-work of the type where you can neither hear the details disappear nor crush each other. It's a record that has eaten itself on its way into the studio and has come out in its own form.
And now comes what I want to say directly to the Danish festival bookers: Wake up. If Farveblind does not appear on more and larger Danish stages in the coming time, they will end up as another Danish export product that we only learn to love when someone in Germany, Holland or England has said that it is okay. That would be embarrassing. And very Danish. They should not be hidden away as a niche project for people with black pants and Resident Advisor notifications. They are not to be served as “exciting Danish names” at a time when the rest of Europe has already understood them. They need to get out now, while we can still manage to call them our own. They have to stand on scenes where people didn't know they needed to be knocked over. Farveblind can handle it. It's the bookers who sleep by the hour.
The dangerous thing about debuting so strongly, of course, is that you risk building your own monument too soon. Justice still has Cross hanging over them like a French leather jacket they can never quite take off. Farveblind may well have made such a record here. A debut that feels not like a beginning, but like a work they will one day have to fight against themselves. Can a debut album be too damn good? This sounds like an idiotic question, but it makes me want to ask it. Not because they can't get better, but because Micro Pleasures already feels like such a record that could end up standing in the way of anything they make afterwards. Their Cross. Their big, dirty, luminescent problem.
Reflection
It may be this sentiment that lingers: That Micro Pleasures is the sound of a band that has gotten better without becoming more civilized. It's harder than it sounds. The Danish cultural landscape is full of projects that mature into a kind of prudence. Farveblind matures into itself. And as I sit here, a little ear-eared, and try to explain what it is I've just heard, I end up in the same place every time: This is an album about small joys in a world where joy is becoming illegal. And it's an album that is itself a small joy. Just not a healthy one.
