#007: No dog days for Husky & Pug
The Swedish producing and songwriting duo Louice and Victoria are better known as Husky & Pug. Maybe not household names (yet), but put on some Icona Pop, Armin van Buuren and Neiked and you’re soon familiar with their work. With Aux Haus, they talked about having Lady Gaga producer Fernando Garibay as a mentor, what it’s like to work together as a couple, and why being delusional might actually be a good thing.
Hi! Wait, is that cap from AVAVAV?
Louice: Yeah, exactly!
I looked at buying the “Filthy Rich” cap.
Victoria: I have that hoodie! The design is genius but the rhinestones are starting to fall off tho haha.
I love their shows, they’re so … chaotic.
V: Yeah, they’re awesome. The designer, Beate, she’s the little sister of this girl I went to school with. I’ve been following her and her sisters for the longest time. Then out of nowhere I saw that Kanye West reposted her fashion show and I knew that she was gonna blow up.
So anyway, I’m really happy we got to do this, finally haha.
V: Yeah I knoooow, we’ve been the worst at getting back BUT we haven’t forgotten about it either.
I read your bio where it says you have somewhat different backgrounds.
V: So I’m from Stockholm, been singing and making music pretty much all my life. My mom insisted that I should apply for Adolf Fredriks Musikklasser, a choir school, when I was nine, so that’s kind of when it all began.
That’s pretty early?
V: Yeah but I thought it was so nerdy at first and they had such high acceptance requirements. So it felt really scary getting accepted to that school. But that turned out to be the best time ever and a great school. So I started singing in the choir. Then in high school I panicked and wanted to be a veterinarian or a doctor. But then I had a nervous breakdown a couple of years later and was like no, I really need to do music for real. So then I applied to Musikmakarna (a music school in Sweden, editor’s note) And that’s where I met Lollo.
It’s sort of a trade school in the middle of nowhere?
V: Yeah, you go there for two years and everyone gets their own studio and you do sessions, projects and stuff. And the second year is an internship year so then everyone leaves and goes to Stockholm, basically.
Right, so there you met Lollo. And what’s your background, Lollo?
L: I’m from Helsingborg.
Oh ok, that’s from my neck of the woods! Did you also get into music early on?
L: Yeah, I started music school when I was ten and started playing bass in a band when I was thirteen. After that I went to a musical high school and started producing a little bit. That got me more into electronic music and creating stuff on the computer instead of playing the bass in a band. After finishing school I lived in Berlin for a while and made music together with a friend. When I got back from Berlin I started to study songwriting/producing in Örnsköldsvik.
V: We started at Musikmakarna in 2016, then did one year of work practice and in 2018 we started teaming up to write songs together. That’s what we’ve been doing since then, as well as producing.
So do you remember the first time you two met each other?
V: My first impression of Louice was in the first week of school. We had an assignment where we were supposed to draw a big coat of arms describing yourself and your life, for everyone to get to know each other better. Most people did pretty generic stuff but Lollo did this very pretty drawing with lots of details and at that point we hadn’t said a word to each other so I walked up to her and was like “oh wow, that looks really nice” because I really wanted to be her friend because she seemed so cool. And she just looked up at me and said “thanks” and I was like ok so I’m never gonna get to hang out with her.
L: Haha that’s not exaaaaactly how I remember it, I obviously never wanted to come off as a bratty girl. My first impression of Victoria was from this Facebook group that everyone was in before school started, and she posted a question about which dorm room was closest to Systembolaget. So I was like who is this person?
Haha living close to where to buy alcohol certainly sounds like a good priority! Ok so then you became friends, what was your first real project after school?
V: Hmm I’m not sure, because we had so many sessions with different artists back then. But our first release was with Adriana, this artist at Universal, but that was when we were still in school.
Do you remember hearing your first song on the radio? Or have Spotify and streaming sort of ruined that classic thing nowadays?
V: It was so much fun back then, because everything was so new and we were still in this kind of honeymoon phase with the music industry. We had been given the air time by P3 for when our song was gonna be played for the first time and I remember our whole class sat together and waited for it to be played. It was so much love.
L: We released a song with Icona Pop last year too and it got quite a lot of radio time, so that too felt like a pretty big deal. That it got played over and over again.
I’m gonna circle back to you working with Icona Pop but first – you mentioned that you were in the “honeymoon phase”, a common image of the music industry is that it’s pretty fucked up. How would you say that your relationship with the music industry has changed over the years?
L: It feels like we’ve been going through so many phases. At first we were kind of delusional, like “well Rihanna might want this song tomorrow”.
V: But you almost HAVE to think like that, that anything is possible, to be able to continue. Then you sort of get into the system and you get to know some amazing and some not so amazing people and it’s such a weird experience.
L: But we have this rule that we try not to talk about the industry too much when we’re working, because it can easily become a bit cynical. We try to remind ourselves to see it the way we saw it before, that everything is possible.
V: I think we’re pretty good at finding that feeling.
What would you say are the greatest parts of the industry?
V: I’d say the best part is all the fun people you meet and get to work with. To be a part of someone's journey.
L: And the fact that anything can happen. Even if it’s hard it‘s still possible.
This might be hard to answer but are there any common threads between the songs that you write?
L: Hmm yeah, that thing. It’s hard to define. When you write with different people all the time you get so many different influences. But when it’s just us we tend to go the more classical pop route. We love love songs and we love big classic pop. And we listen to a lot of old music.
V: I think we’re good at working on, or sort of grinding down, a song until we’re a 100% happy with it.
You work really closely together, do you ever get tired of that or of each other?
L: Well, the thing is, we’re also a couple.
Oh, ok, I didn’t know that.
V: Yeah, so we kinda see each other all the time.
That’s pretty unusual. For a couple to also be working together I mean?
V: It must be pretty hard for anyone who’s not in the business to be in a relationship with a musician, because it’s such a different lifestyle. As a musician, you sacrifice a lot and you spend so many hours in the studio and you’re on standby a lot of the time. So it’s a nice feeling to be able to share that with someone you love. You can both share the success and be there for eachother in the hard times. So when we bicker it’s usually about small stuff. But we always leave all that outside of the studio and we try to be super professional when we work with other people. A lot ot the times people don’t realize that we’re a couple until we heat up the same food during lunch haha.
L: I think we’re also very good at killing our darlings. When we write we always work towards what’s best for the song and not our egos. None of us gets offended if the other person doesn't like their idea. And at the end of the day, it’s our song and we both get equal cred.
You mentioned Icona Pop earlier, how did that collaboration happen? What was that like?
V: Honestly we got that one served on a silver platter. Because they were supposed to have a session with someone else who canceled. So our A&R texted us the night before and asked “do you wanna have a session with Icona Pop tomorrow?”.
L: We were like “YES PLEASE” because we love them, and so we worked on a couple of ideas with the both of them and a producer called Yaro, who is awesome. And then we did the hook and the verses for “Fall In Love” and right away we felt that that song was special. Then they continued working on it until it was finished. And two years later it was finally released!
Official video for Icona Pop's "Fall in Love"
You also worked with Armin van Buuren, right?
L: Yeah, it was during a songwriting camp at Ten Studios in Stockholm. That was the same thing. “Someone got sick, do you wanna come?”. So Armin jumped between the studios and gave us feedback and he really liked our song, so he and his producer did a trance version of it. It felt good that we were able to deliver on that exact day. Then later on they had another camp with him and that time we got invited right away haha.
That’s awesome! I also read somewhere that you were mentored by Fernando Garibay?
V: Yeah, he’s a songwriter and producer who has worked with Lady Gaga and she is our all time favorite artist. It’s like our biggest dream to have a session with her. So anyway, he understood that there was all this talent coming from Musikmakarna, our school. So he talked to our principal Ulla and came to our school and talked about his studio in LA and that he would gladly accept students from our school.
L: He apparently got so exhausted after working on the “Born This Way” album that he just slept for two years. After that he wanted to find a more sustainable way of working. So we took out a student loan and convinced two other friends from our class to go to LA. We went over there in 2017 and had sessions in the studio next to his, and he would give feedback on everything we did. Then we’d go into the main studio and listen to the stuff he was working on. So that was great. And at the end of the two months he was like “you should move here” but we didn’t have any money left so we went back to Sweden haha.
V: We learned so much, it’s so inspiring to work closely with a person who has worked with so many artists that you look up to. Before we met him we would have thrown away songs that we didn’t think were great and just move on to a new song, but he was like “no, keep the chorus but change the verses” and stuff like that. And that taught us to keep working on a song until it became as good as we wanted it to be.
Ok so I’m curious, because obviously you’ve been doing this for quite a while and you’re obviously great at what you do and successful, but do you ever think that you’re only as good as your latest song? Do you ever get stressed out that work is gonna dry up?
V: I think the industry only thinks that you’re as good as your latest song. Or that your best song defines you. I don’t feel that way. In my head, a great song that you’ve written never dies. And I feel like we’ve gotten better and better at not caring what the industry thinks and to only focus on us and on what we like and believe in. If we give off good energy, good things are gonna happen.
L: A couple of weeks ago, we were talking about how we’d love to go on a fun songwriting camp. And out of the blue, a few days later this big company slid in our DMs and wondered if we wanted to join one in the south of France. It felt like we sort of manifested that opportunity. I guess you have to be a bit delulu in this industry haha.
