Swedish electropunk duo The Guilt return with their third full-length album, Naked Rat Dance, out January 15th via Icons Creating Evil Art. The Malmö pair — Emma Wahlgren and Lizzy — deliver their most emotionally charged and sonically expansive work to date: an album built from friction, velocity, and the exhilarating chaos of being human. “Naked Rat Dance is a major emotional output,” the band explains. “The range is wider but it hits harder.”
The Guilt have long been known for their high-octane, glitter-stained electropunk — but here, their sound stretches into a ferocious new spectrum. Riot grrrl bluntness bends into goth-rock grandeur, synths lurch with deranged weight, and melodies chase something absurdly, defiantly epic. As the band puts it: “We took all we’ve got — all our tools and everything we feel — and we ran with it. Or danced with it.”
Since consolidating into the core duo of Lizzy and Emma, The Guilt’s creative process has been, in their own words, “a hysterical ride.” They never aimed for a genre, only a feeling — and those feelings came fast. “It’s like driving at high speed with no space between the vehicles,” they say of the album’s unhinged emotional acceleration.
Across the sessions, the band pushed themselves into new territory — and, as they admit, they’re not entirely sure who pushed who the most. The album was recorded, mixed and produced by Alain Steffler (Le Prince Harry), a long-time collaborator who also handles most of the band’s live sound. Mastering comes from Nikolay Evdokimov of Black Ocean Studio, whom the band affectionately calls “the mad professor of analogue distortion.”
The album’s title grew from a demo once called “Rat Dance” — named not after the animal, but the RAT distortion pedal shredding its guts out on the track. That song later evolved into Naked on My Own yet the imagery of the rat refused to die. – “Not totally unaware of the long-gone meme of the rat dance — we still went for it,” Lizzy says. “Internet doesn’t age as well as we do. I’m way too digitally exhausted to give a rat’s ass.”
Working with artist Emilia for the album cover, the duo realized the theme had deepened:
Naked Rat Dance became an image of “human skinbags” — vulnerable, frantic, intertwined but never fully connecting.
“For us, NAKED RAT DANCE is about humans — super vulnerable, crawling on top of each other in a rat race to win at life,” the band shares. – “We’re silly, sensitive, constantly needing contact but always moving, not going anywhere. Dancing is not the worst for us naked rats; we can be the pied pipers from Malmö.”
If earlier releases buzzed with chaotic fun, Naked Rat Dance tears that fun open to reveal something rawer, funnier, and more painfully alive. The album thrashes, purrs, spirals, lashes out, and then — in true The Guilt fashion — invites you to dance through the wreckage.
The Guilt remain one of Sweden’s most kinetic live acts, and Naked Rat Dance captures their danger-glitter-therapy energy with ruthless clarity. It is the sound of a band past the point of overthinking — sprinting headfirst into their most expressive, volatile, and joyously unhinged era.
