En Är För Mycket Och Tusen Aldrig Nog

Gustav Ejstes has always been on his way to someplace else. The Swedish musician has been making records as Dungen for two decades now, and while he’s lauded as one of the sharpest and most adventurous musicians in psychedelic music since 2004’s breakthrough Ta det lungt, for Ejstes psych has always been only a starting point. Or maybe it’s something more like an ethos—psych with its promise of exploration, the way it prioritizes seeking out new sounds, of leaving the old self behind, of setting into the ether to see what else might be out there. En Är För Mycket och Tusen Aldrig Nog (One is Too Much and a Thousand is Never Enough) is the first Dungen record since 2016’s Häxan and the first proper Dungen studio album since Allas Sak was released in 2015. If we’re thinking of psych-rock as a genre, with its readymade tropes—fuzz guitars, shimmering harmonies, pastoral textures—it’s possibly the least psychedelic record Ejstes has ever made. But if psych is really about transcending what’s come before in favor of new ways of seeing and hearing, then the opposite is true. And that means En Är För Mycket och Tusen Aldrig Nog goes further out than any Dungen record before it. There are classic psych rave-ups, of course, and the kind of brilliant vocal harmonies Ejstes has long made his trademark. There are soft, shuffling grooves that transform into wide-eyed cosmic revelations. There are intimate songs guided by Ejstes and his piano, which he plays so gently it sounds like he’s trying not to wake someone in the next room.

The Swedish psych-rock pioneers’ songs are usually like odysseys, but their first full-length studio album in seven years is more of a pleasure cruise.

The psychedelic sounds of Swedish collective Dungen have taken many forms since the band really got rolling in the early 2000s, but on eighth studio album En Är För Mycket och Tusen Aldrig Nog, they expand their reach to include the unexpected and the unlikely.

Purveyors of uniquely Swedish psychedelia and perennial prog darlings Dungen have returned with their first studio album proper since 2015’s Allas Sak.

En Är För Mycket Och Tusen Aldrig Nog by Dungen: a mashup of influences that somehow becomes even greater than its myriad parts

En Är För Mycket is even brighter and bolder than Dungen's past works, transfiguring pastoral impressions into wild explorations of fuzzy, feedback-heavy brilliance.