How Johan Duncanson made peace with The Radio Dept.'s Pet Grief

When it finally arrived in 2006 – after the acclaim that had followed debut Lesser Matters – some of the reviews were hard to take. “I remember Martin saying to me, ‘But this is really your album, Johan,’” Duncanson tells me. “It felt like an accusation.”

For a week or two, he obsessed over it, then found a way to fire the same accusation back. “I can't remember by what logic or anything, but it felt real,” he says. “We just accused each other of being responsible for the record. But of course it was a collaboration.”

Twenty years later, it would be difficult to find either of them guilty of much. Songs that spent years sitting quietly in the band's catalogue are suddenly reaching a new audience. “Sleeping In” has overtaken “Heaven's on Fire” among their most-streamed tracks, and Duncanson says that when he looks at the band's most listened-to songs now, they are dominated by Pet Grief.

“I never really realised that was happening until very recently,” he says. “Then we saw ‘Sleeping In’ taking off a bit. If you go into streaming services and see the top songs, it's almost exclusively Pet Grief now.”

None of this makes Pet Grief the obvious candidate for a second life. The band's manager thinks TikTok might have something to do with it. Duncanson doesn't use it, so most of that has been happening without him. He isn't sure why Pet Grief, specifically, is connecting again either.

“Someone wrote somewhere that we make music that feels like the musical equivalent of being spooned, which I thought was very funny and endearing.” He pauses. “Maybe that's it. It's comfort music maybe for people. Rough times, and maybe that's what people need. I don't know.”

The strange part is that making Pet Grief wasn't particularly comfortable. By 2005, things had been going well for The Radio Dept. Lesser Matters, later reissued by XL, had been released two years earlier and was followed by the Pulling Our Weight and This Past Week EPs. “We'd been spoiled with good reviews up until then,” Duncanson says. “We were really nervous about making people disappointed, I guess. Having to make asses of ourselves in some way. We were scared of being laughed at.”

There was also the problem of what came next. “We didn't know where we were going at all,” he says. “We just knew what we didn't want to do.”

One of those things was rock music. The Radio Dept. had never been particularly easy to place there anyway. Lesser Matters had guitars, but they were buried beneath layers of distortion, drum machines and Duncanson's voice. By the time work began on Pet Grief, even that felt too conventional: “We steered away from anything that would make anyone think rock. We'd become a bit sceptical about guitars altogether. For a while we said it would be a completely electronic record and no one could accuse us of being rockers.”

There was one problem: “We like guitars so much!”

So the guitars stayed. On the finished record, they became more texture than riff, sitting alongside the drum machines rather than over them. Duncanson didn't always stick to his own rules, though. Shortly before moving to Stockholm, he met Carlberg in a café between their apartments and played him a demo of “Every Time”. It was, in Duncanson's words, “really mega, super distorted”.

“He was scolding me afterwards, saying, ‘This is what you tell me I can't do now on the album, making noise with guitars, and you come looking to me with this.’”

The finished version went in the other direction. “We should have released it like it was because it became a bit too clean,” Duncanson says. “But yeah, you never get it perfect.”

Duncanson moved from Malmö to Stockholm in the summer of 2005, changing how he and Carlberg worked together for the first time. Where they had once lived close enough to see each other constantly, they now had to travel between the two cities to record. Daniel Tjäder would occasionally join them in Malmö. Outside the band, they were still taking whatever work they could find.

“We hadn't really educated ourselves, nothing we could use for getting a real job, so we took what we could find.” That included schools, kindergartens and janitorial work. For a while, both Duncanson and Carlberg worked in psychiatric institutions. At one, Duncanson was in his early twenties and spent his days sitting with patients or playing ping-pong. At the end of his shift, he got to go home.

“I remember realising how harsh a punishment locking people up really is,” he says. “I went home at the end of the day saying goodbye to everyone that I'd been hanging out with, pretty much, and them locking the door. There was a window in the door, and sometimes you met someone's gaze, and it felt weird, you know, turning the key.”

It didn't inspire “A Window”. That was about bands. “There were other bands around at the time that were bragging a lot.” He and Carlberg were proud of what The Radio Dept. were doing, but had little interest in behaving like it. “We felt that the music could speak for itself, and we didn't have to brag about it.”

Recording happened around the jobs. They at least had time. “None of us had any family or kids that we were responsible for, so we still had a lot of time on our hands. At least weekends, we could see each other.”

If Pet Grief sounds more expensive than three people fitting an album around work and train journeys, that was deliberate. “We were trying to sound a bit more expensive than our equipment would allow,” Duncanson says. They recorded mostly in apartments, using cheap PCs and cracked recording programs.

“Cool Edit was the one that we used, I think. And a small guitar amp that we put everything through, like the keyboards and the vocals and the guitars and bass and everything. That was pretty much it.”

The Swedish independent scene around them at that time was fertile – The Knife, Jens Lekman, The Embassy, The Tough Alliance – and Duncanson traces a lot of it back to Pop, an influential '90s Swedish music magazine. “They took pop music seriously,” he says. “I guess they were educating a whole generation of kids that later started these bands.”

Pet Shop Boys and Prefab Sprout's Steve McQueen were on repeat for him and Carlberg while making the record. I mention The Blue Nile. “Oh yes, we discovered The Blue Nile around that time,” Duncanson says. They even tried covering “The Downtown Lights”. “We wanted to modernise pop music, but still make pop songs,” he says.

Shortly before Pet Grief was finished, an EMI label rep came to Duncanson's home to hear the new material. “Is everything this romantic?” Duncanson remembers him asking. He and Carlberg looked at each other. “We had no idea,” he says. “I think we were playing what we thought was an upbeat song to him.”

At the time, their concern was that Pet Grief was too pop. It took rehearsing the album to discover they might have a different problem. “We realised that all the songs were very calm,” Duncanson says. “Even the more upbeat songs have something very calm about them.”

There was nothing like “Why Won't You Talk About It?”, the burst of distortion from Lesser Matters that could change the energy of a room. “We were scared that people would be falling asleep. We didn't have any song like that to pick it up. Nothing. So that was scary.”

Then there was the title. “My idea from the start was that it was like a favourite grief more than about a pet. Something you can't let go of, even though you know you'd be a happier person if you did.”

“The Worst Taste in Music” was less complicated. “It's like a vain kind of way to comfort yourself after someone has left you.” “I Wanted You to Feel the Same” was more personal. “It's about Martin's and mine relationship. We hung out all the time, just recording music, and as soon as you'd done that you went on tour. Just being together a lot, being young and maybe not handling that situation very well always.”

The Radio Dept. had been built around that closeness. Pet Grief was made just as it was becoming more complicated. Duncanson had moved away, recording now required planning and, when the album finally came out, some of the reaction confirmed what they had been worrying about. “It had some good reviews, but what we had feared became true in a way,” he says. “There were a lot of lukewarm reviews and people not liking it. We'd been so spoiled with good reviews, so it was a bit tough to take.”

That was when Carlberg told him Pet Grief was really his album. “I was hurt because we couldn't face the music as a band, as a unit, in solidarity,” he says. “Practically, I guess, it was like my fault that it sounded the way it did.”

Soon enough, they were both blaming each other. They eventually moved on. The Radio Dept.'s third album, Clinging to a Scheme, arrived four years later. “We kind of left that album,” Duncanson says of Pet Grief. “It wasn't a good feeling really between us and our feelings about the album. At least that's what I think he thinks too. But then we made Clinging… afterwards and became better friends again with that album.”

Pet Grief, meanwhile, stayed where they had left it – but its songs didn't. “Sleeping In” has travelled particularly far. Its recent streaming numbers surprised Duncanson. Its origins are darker: “There was a kid in my class when I was, I guess, 17 or 18,” Duncanson says. “He killed himself, and that had been in my mind for years.”

Duncanson became uncomfortable with the way people would sometimes describe somebody who had taken their own life as selfish. “You don't know anything really,” he says. “You don't know what made them do what they did.” With “Sleeping In”, he tried to push against that judgement: “I tried to make an opposite claim. I don't know if it worked, but that was the idea at least, to make it heroic almost, just to counter what you usually hear.”

Now, twenty years after its release, it is helping introduce people to Pet Grief for the first time. Duncanson's own relationship with the album has changed more slowly. “It's nice when some time has passed and you can listen to it differently,” he says. “That time has to pass, I guess, before you can. Or at least that's the case for me.”

He thinks he last listened to Pet Grief properly around a year ago. “It sounded better to me than I remembered it.” Then he laughs at himself. “But maybe that's because people are telling us that it's good. We're insecure like everyone. So of course it's nice when people kind of get what we were trying for.”

What he hears now is an album that holds together more than he realised at the time. “I think perhaps that it's pretty consistent,” he adds. “We thought it was too pop to release almost for a while because we'd been so anti-rock, and then we thought it became too pop instead. But it has a feel to it. It's not that it's one flavour all the way through, but they kind of sew together. They work together, the songs, sound-wise and how they feel.”

There are still things he would change: “A ton of stuff. But that's always going to be the case.”

The Radio Dept. have other things to worry about now. When we speak, Duncanson is in a small studio close to his home in southern Stockholm, finishing recordings and preparing to play live again. The band haven't been on stage in nearly a decade and will play their first run of shows this autumn, with a date at Pitchfork London on 3 November – ten days before Pet Grief's re-release. From the outside, it looks like a long break. It hasn't felt like one to him.

“In my head, we've always been three or four months from a finished album because I keep telling myself that,” he tells me. “It hasn't felt like we've been away. We've been away from playing live, of course, but it never felt like we took a break from the band or anything. We've been doing stuff all along.”

The problem has been finishing it. There was something appealing about remaining permanently in the process of making songs, where nobody else could decide whether they were any good. “Perhaps the creativity without the risk of anyone judging you,” says Duncanson. “Just making songs because we loved making songs, but then not releasing them, which is also idiotic.”

The Radio Dept.'s new material is moving in another direction again. Where the band's last record, Running Out of Love, turned more overtly political and electronic, Duncanson describes what they are working on now as quite the opposite. “It's more introspective lyrically, and it's quite guitar-y,” he says.

Twenty years on, if Duncanson could show the Johan of 2006 what became of Pet Grief, there isn't a particular review, streaming figure or anniversary reissue he thinks would surprise him most. “Maybe that people are talking about it or listening to it at all,” he says. “We were just doing stuff for now and didn't think that people would be listening decades later.”

For all the record's recent attention, Duncanson hasn't yet listened to it again with Carlberg: “It would be nice to have a sit down with Martin and listen to it together,” he concludes.