Club 8: The Boy Who Couldn't Stop Dreaming

Singer Karolina Komstedt and Acid House Kings co-founder Johan Angergård and have recorded six albums as Club 8, each one packed with airy, hushed ballads of varying twee-ness. The sixth album, The Boy Who Couldn't Stop Dreaming, finds the duo ultra-relaxed, keeping the instrumentation spare but precise on songs like the peppy "Football Kids" (which adds brush drums and organ to Komstedt's lilting monotone) and "In The Morning" (which accents soft acoustic strumming with snaps and whistles). Although Club 8 predates the current Swede-pop wave by more than a decade, the band distills the scene down to its gentle, twinkly essence, relying on little more than a pleasant melody and a whisper of sophistication to convey what some of their colleagues need a 20-piece DIY orchestra to produce.