Artist Profile: Echo Thrills

Oskar Jennefors, the artist behind Swedish psychedelic pop project Echo Thrills, has been invested in music his whole life, and, across his number of years in the industry, has taken on the breadth of multiple occupations and styles of musical expression. Yet, with the release of his first album The Inner City, under the Echo Thrills moniker, Jennefors has rediscovered his love for this expression, exploding forth from a bubbling cauldron of the genres and sounds that have defined him since his musical foundations.

While Jennefors grew up in the context of his parents’ love for disco and pop music, he rapidly formed his own taste even as a young child, spending hours upon hours watching MTV on his television. From this cultural exposure, combined with his love for skateboarding and the Tony Hawk Pro Skater video game series, he surrounded himself, from an early age, with a combination of EDM, house, hip-hop, psychedelic pop, and disco music- sounds that he describes as being undeniably “fun”.

However, he had no exposure to the possibility of making music until he was a teenager. After he underwent his confirmation in the Church of Sweden, he received a heap of money from his relatives, which he initially used to buy a scooter. Yet, after about a year, he got bored of the scooter, and he sold it and reinvested the money in DJ equipment.

This turned out to be a life-changing turn of his whims.

Although he had no technical musical knowledge, he began chopping up samples and churning out his own loops, which he would later use to make hip-hop beats. He fell in love with burning these instrumentals onto CDs and taking them to show his creations to his friends, and, slowly but surely, this led him into a career as a DJ in Stockholm. As he learned more and more through experience, his passion for the possibilities of movement and frenetic dance latent in electronic music grew exponentially.

“I didn't know anything, so I just played around, and that's how I learned. I'm not the kind of person that dives deep into something and becomes an expert and learns everything reading on forums or watching tutorials. The way I learn, I want to just explore and have fun.”

Yet, as he carved out a path for himself as a DJ and producer, even signing a major record deal in the States, he put so much of his energy into his career that, ultimately, he was left utterly burnt out after just a few years. House, and electronic music in general, was moving in a new direction: one that Jennefors did not quite have the energy, or the passion, left to pursue.

“At that point in my life, my music career was everything for me. I set everything else on hold because I was too caught up in it… I used music at that time as a way to just get away from my own life… and that led me to a place where I felt like I had to stop. I couldn’t continue. It wasn’t fun. I didn't find any joy in making or playing house music.”

After a lengthy break, Jennefors found a gig working as a songwriter for other musicians, and, through a gradual process, he began to slowly regain his passion for making music. While it wasn’t quite the same as he first felt when he was exploring the possibilities of his own sound, the activity of collaboration, which was something he had missed out on working in house music, was refreshing.

Yet, after spending a year working with a certain artist on a disco/pop inspired project that ultimately did not come to fruition, Jennefors was left with more inspiration than he had felt in a long time, and he desperately craved an outlet for it. 

This initially led to his pandemic-begotten disco project under the moniker Temple in Man, Golden Sparks. However, his newest venture, Echo Thrills, and their first album, which was released in mid October, represents the full rejuvenation of his passion for musical expression.

“I need to have that feeling of freedom and just having fun, not giving a f*ck, basically. I think that's how I felt when I wrote the album as well, so I went back to a lot of music that's been a big inspiration for me. Of course, most of the inspiration for the album has been based on my idea of New York in the 90s: mid 90s punk and skate culture colliding with hip hop [and indie rock and psychedelia]... It's a combination of the genres that have been inspiring me since I was a child.”

As much fun as Jennefors indicates that The Inner City was for him to make, it is possibly even more fun to listen to. From more bass-driven tracks such as “Casual Bliss” to tracks that call back to his psychedelic roots, such as “Outside”, the project carries an undeniable groove from start to finish, keeping the listener bouncing with each and every sonic turn it takes.

Moreover, Echo Thrills has seen Jennefors taking on a distinctly more collaborative approach to his creative process, as he will carve out demos for each track purely using samples, and the members of the band will fill out each part from there using the samples as a reference, giving each track a unique life that they would not have otherwise.

Now, as Echo Thrills continues to play these songs live in and around Stockholm, Jennefors feels fully recharged, and it should be tantalizing to see what direction his new burst of energy takes him.