Pelle Almqvist and The Hives are prepping for an intimate gig at Hollywood’s No Vacancy. His voice is a little ragged from previous nights’ shows as he plops down near the Georgian windows on the upper level of the venue. Dinner is prepared, and the band is taking a breather around one of the bar areas upstairs. We’re talking about the current The Hives Forever Forever The Hives tour, where Almqvist has regularly encouraged his fans to put their cell phones away and enjoy the show (he’ll do it again later tonight at No Vacancy, though no phones will be tossed onto the stage this time). Almqvist loves touring with his longtime friends, but has a workmanlike humility about it. Each audience is a little different, and the band attempts to meet each moment every night.
The Hives recently unveiled some iconic new suits for their performances in collaboration with the Tiger of Sweden fashion brand, who made the design based on hand-drawn sketches from Almqvist. The Hives have worked with Tiger on and off since they wore the brand’s black-and-white off-the-rack suits in the early ’00s. For the latest design, the shoulders have a pagoda construction and an impressive Western piping that lights up onstage. “It feels like a homecoming working with Tiger of Sweden again,” the band shared in a press statement. “Since this album and tour is all about celebrating The Hives’ legacy, and so much of that was dressed in Tiger, it feels right.”
While the band’s classic stage outfits may be refreshed, the Swedish group’s principles in punk and garage rock remain firmly rooted in tradition. The Hives Forever Forever The Hives is refreshingly unfazed by current trends and instead attacks the concept of being the best Hives record it can be in the year 2025. Recording sessions for the project occurred at Riksmixningsverket, a studio owned by ABBA’s Benny Andersson, and at YEAR0001’s Stockholm studio. The LP was also co-produced by longtime collaborator Pelle Gunnerfeldt and Beastie Boys’ Mike D. Queens of the Stone Age frontman Josh Homme also added ideas in an advisory role.
Almqvist says that at the time of their previous album’s release, The Hives Forever had already come together, but the band wanted to wait for the right time to share it. “They were kind of imagined up as two records, but when we put out the last one, we didn’t want there to be any talk of there being two records,” he notes. “They were more kind of parallel. This one isn’t really leftovers—we consider it a slightly different idea.”
As the band prepares to embark on the European/UK leg of their tour, read more from our exchange with Almqvist below.
You maintain a pretty consistent idea about what “The Hives” is. You haven’t really pushed and pulled in some crazy direction, which I think is kind of appreciated.
I think it’s also that they say “the Eskimos have 110 words for snow,” whereas if you’re looking at The Hives from an outside, mainstream perspective, it looks like we’re doing the same thing all the time. But to us and people in the rock and roll community, it’s pretty different.
It’s good that you do have some consistency, because you see the rock genre go up and down in terms of popularity over the years.
I guess we kind of feel like popularity really doesn’t have that much to do with us. It’s more that we’re doing our thing, the thing we want to do, and also because a lot of the bands that we looked up to were really consistent with their vision, like AC/DC, the Ramones, The Cramps, and Devo. If you have a thing, a craftwork, you should keep your thing—perfect it and think inside the box.
“We kind of feel like popularity really doesn’t have that much to do with us. It’s more that we’re doing our thing, the thing we want to do.”
Was there anything with this new album that you definitely wanted to set apart from the last one?
There was an idea that the last record was going to be kind of the gnarly punk comeback, and this record was going to be more of an arena-rock affair, or more polished. I think they landed way closer to each other than what we maybe intended. You’ve got to have at least an idea of what you want to do differently. I think pretty much every record we’ve done has been a reaction in some small way against the last record: Veni Vidi Vicious was our super-loose rock record in comparison to Tyrannosaurus Hives. Then the next one, we wanted to keep it really tight. We did a record that we did everything ourselves on—produced it and all that stuff—and it was a reaction against the record where we collaborated with everyone. So it’s a little bit of back and forth, but we land with our feet firmly planted on high soil every time, it seems.
It’s like you almost hit a soft reset each time.
Reboot. Yeah, it’s like it’s an updated operating system. It’s not a new computer.
There isn’t one album where I feel like you guys kind of put it into cruise control.
I think our version of cruise control was not putting out an album for 10 years [laughs]. I don’t feel like we want to release something unless it has that feeling of, “Shit, this might be the only album they ever make.” We were trying for a decade, but were failing. It wasn’t like we decided we were going to take a 10-year break from albums. I don’t think it was a very gradual sinking toward the bottom, and then, finally, we’re back putting out music which feels really a lot better. [2012’s Lex Hives] was kind of like a zombie version—something still running it, but it’s maybe not the brain. It’s infected by some fungus that keeps it going.
Do you think that gap was just because you’ve been going so long, or is it more outside forces?
Well, there was COVID and a switch in management. I mean, when we were young, we were always laughing about Guns N’ Roses’ Chinese Democracy and how long that took to make, and we were realizing that we were closing in on that. Suddenly you have so much sympathy for Oasis. “Sure, I get it now.”
“When we were young, we were always laughing about Guns N’ Roses’ Chinese Democracy and how long that took to make... Suddenly you have so much sympathy for Oasis.”
The Hives at Ace of Spades in Sacramento, CA (September 20, 2025)
Are there any new songs where you were surprised by the reactions?
“The Hives Forever Forever The Hives” gets people to respond, and it feels like people are really ready to sing along to that. That’s our celebration of ourselves at the end of the show. When we were kids—we all grew up together—[drummer Chris Dangerous] went to a Depeche Mode show and he talked about how they played “Enjoy the Silence” or “Personal Jesus” and then the people were walking out to the subway singing the last song. We thought we should have one of those, and it’s surprising how well it worked. Maybe we said it in some interview and people read it, but it does seem like people just kind of do it on their own, too.
You were talking about how you got closer to the more polished look, but you ended up reverting back to the demo sound a bit more.
Yeah, I think the idea of it was that we were going to make it more polished, but then when we were finished with the record, we tried to make professional mixes with big-name professional mixers. Have them mix it and see if it would be cool to have a broad-spectrum hi-fi version of The Hives. We’ve never really tried to do that. Maybe a few songs on The Black and White Album. At the end of the day, even the label preferred the rough mixes. I couldn’t find anyone who didn’t prefer the rough mixes. We kind of just gave up and said, “OK, I guess we’re using the rough mix, then.”
“We break it every time and have to rebuild it, and it just looks kind of the same every time we rebuild it.”
What are some key ways that you guys have evolved since the beginning? And what are some ways that you’ve been like, “Oh, that’s tried and true, we’re not going to break that”?
I mean, we end up somewhere tried-and-true, but we break it every time and have to rebuild it, and it just looks kind of the same every time we rebuild it. But I think we still have to break everything and put it together, or it’s hard for us to go. Sometimes we’ll be like, “We’ve got to write a song that’s this style” or whatever. I think we have a very roundabout way of making pretty direct music. What’s evolved, I think, is we’ve probably gotten a little better at trusting what feels good rather than being in our heads and trying to calculate what it’s going to be. If something is a bad idea on paper, but it feels good to do, maybe we’re a little bit more likely to do the thing that feels right.
Is that the same for the lyrics? Is that something that you’re workshopping as the song is being built up?
Yeah, they don’t come fully formed; that takes the longest. It’s just basically trying to puzzle sentences together into something that feels good. It’s kind of like building the house, but then ripping off wallpaper as you go, and that looks better. It’s all very LEGO. It’s not like we sit down with the acoustic guitar and write a song in five minutes, and then it’s going to stay that way. FL
