Acclaimed Stockholm-based artist/producer/composer Joel Danell, who records as Sven Wunder, is rarely absent from his studio without good reason. But for the past several weeks, he’s dedicated nearly every day to preparing for his first live performances in the U.S., which begin Saturday (Sept. 20) in Philadelphia as part of Freddie Gibbs and the Alchemist’s Alfredo 2 tour.
Having experimented with personnel at a handful of his debut live shows in Europe late last year, Wunder will be joined on tour by multi-instrumentalist Josefin Runsteen. Between them, they’ll cover bass, drums and keyboards in bringing to life material from the imminent new album, Daybreak, but the gorgeous orchestral arrangements found therein will be emanating from a non-human source.
“Unfortunately, it was not financially doable on this tour to bring strings. Plus, as a support act, you play for like 20 minutes, so it doesn’t make sense to bring a nine-piece band or something,” Wunder tells SPIN. “It’s a bit hysterical. We’re trying to strip down and do the most with the instruments we have and then we top it up with a little bit of backtracks as well. This is a good accidental pause from being in the studio. It’s very nice to focus on my own music, but in a different way.”
Wunder remains unsure how exactly he got booked with Gibbs and the Alchemist, but having grown up as a hip-hop fan in the ’90s while being raised by a jazz drummer father and bossa nova-loving mother, he can’t wait to meet the artists in the flesh. “I haven’t spoken a word to them yet, but I have huge respect for them,” he says. “I’ve spent a lot of time with hip-hop music and I really like the way Alchemist uses samples. He brought back interest in boom-bap music and the type of sampling I fell in love with as a kid.”
Wunder’s four prior albums for Piano Piano Records have highlighted the vintage sounds of Anatolian rock, Japanese stringed instruments, heavily orchestrated, ballad-leaning jazz and Italian library music. Drawing from a number of those disparate styles, Daybreak is both dreamy and dynamic, with the same musical themes appearing in different forms in nearly every song. Sonically, Daybreak touches both on the bass-driven, orchestral psych-rock sounds of David Axelrod and the sweeping grandeur of some of Wunder’s favorite Italian composers, including Ennio Morricone, Piero Piccioni and Piero Umiliani.
“I had an idea that I wanted it to be about canal boating. An underwater or marine theme sounded very nice,” Wunder reveals. “So from the beginning, the sound of many tracks was completely different. I rewrote a lot of things and in the end it ended up in this symphonic ethos, or perhaps a bit more related to nature. In other words, the concept started to come together more towards the end this time.”
Wunder is already looking ahead to his next round of performances in 2026, which will allow him to bring a larger band on the road. “On the first five or six shows last year, we didn’t play too many mellow songs,” he says. “It was more of the psych-rock part of my catalog. Now, we’re actually changing it up. The shows we will play next year will be with a string quartet and bass, drums, guitar and Rhodes, which will allow us to play more from the new album.”
After his first foray into hip-hop collaboration with a 2023 Danny Brown track, Wunder says he’d be thrilled if more rap-leaning listeners discovered him thanks to the Gibbs/Alchemist tour. “To get a vocal on your own track is nice, but it’s also really nice to hear producers with new takes on my ideas,” he says. “Both of those options are really interesting to me. I took a pretty long break from checking out hip-hop during the trap beat period, because that type of drum sound was so far away from with I fell in love with, which was soul, funk and hip-hop. These days, producers are picking up the MPC [drum machines] again. They’re making incredible beats that really line up with my taste.”
Looking ahead, Wunder also produced and co-wrote the upcoming album from Melody’s Echo Chamber, which is expected to be released later this year by Domino. “It is a little bit outside of the Sven sound, but I think people will be able to hear that I had some part in the making of it,” he reports. “We had a bit of a different way to compose songs, but it turned out really nice. It was a really fun experience because to work with such a vocalist is something I haven’t done that much. Sometimes we would bang our heads, but she always knew where she was heading.”
