The Hives
The Hives Forever Forever The Hives
PIAS
The Hives’ album titles read like comic book stories of heroic proportions, with mutants of society fighting for garage-punk justice over the past 30 years. The Swedish rockers possessed an outsized ambition from the jump, and it still can’t be contained by festival fields or sporting arenas—they continue to rock and give zero fucks about about current trends, which feels refreshing in 2025 in an era of oddball genre spins. After collecting tons of material from their The Death of Randy Fitzsimmons sessions a few years back, the 13 tracks newly collected as The Hives Forever Forever The Hives originally sounded glossier before they opted to tinker with them and ship out the rougher demo versions instead. Their resulting seventh album sounds like another fiery debut.
The Hives have done a lot over the years, from dubbing themselves the new hotness on their 1997 debut Barely Legal to dropping their pop-culture pariah album early with 2000’s Veni Vidi Vicious; they anticipated people calling them punk-rock dinosaurs in 2004 with Tyrannosaurus Hives, then took their Tasmanian Devil spin at mid-career meanderings with 2007’s The Black and White Album and Lex Hives five years later. After all that, they jump-started a stagnant career after more than a decade of silence in 2023 by reminding us that rock music permits us to act like perpetual teenagers in this wild world. Global tours with Foo Fighters, Arctic Monkeys, and Green Day in the interim helped them rediscover their audience and overall groove.
For The Hives Forever, the group roped in their long-standing collaborator in producer Pelle Gunnerfeldt (Viagra Boys, Yung Lean), as well as Mike D and a bit of sage advice from rocker pal Josh Homme. But the album feels lean and mean from the jump, as an orchestra rumbles to life on the intro track. Early single and opening anthem “Enough Is Enough” vamps onto the stage with infectious guitar and crunching drums—frontman Howlin’ Pelle Almqvist looks downright unhinged in the boxing match music video, matching the song’s energy. It’s their latest swing at a rock crossover hit and a track that will certainly get tossed onto any future greatest-hits comps.
In the announcement for The Hives Forever, Almqvist and team call themselves an “international rock sensation.” Although the band has always been tongue-in-cheek and downright humble in interviews, The Hives’ loveable onstage braggadocio is bursting at the seams on this record. They also show plenty of love again for their hard-rock and punk forebears, such as AC/DC, Ramones, and The Sonics.
Now, is “every single song a single, every single a hit, every hit a direct hit in the face of the man,” as the band later claims in that same press release? Not quite, but tracks like “Hooray Hooray Hooray” and “Bad Call” make a case for why the group has such longevity, as they take on the rhythmic call-and-response influence from working with a Beastie Boy. The guitars and drums share center stage on “Paint a Picture,” “O.C.D.O.D.,” and “Legalize Living” to keep the energy up and set up an equally frenetic side B. The high-energy, raw, and jubilant sounds you expect from a Hives live show drop like a series of firecrackers on “Roll Out the Red Carpet” and “They Can’t Hear the Music.” “Born a Rebel” gets the surf-rock guitar and cowbell groove going, and “Path of Most Resistance” sounds like another well-oiled festival-circuit rocker.
At the end of this rock blitzkrieg, The Hives surprise us by dropping the slickest song on the whole album with its title track. The music video for “The Hives Forever Forever the Hives” shows the band members executing the monarch versions of themselves, while dancing and tossing their severed heads around. The video ends with the usual Hives wink as we witness a burning pile of their old vinyl records—Veni Vidi Vicious, indeed. Look forward to their next debut in two to 10 years.
