Viagra Boys
Royal Oak Music Theatre
Sept. 19, 2025
It’s refreshing to see that punk – as an idea, as a scene, as a live show – is still welcoming newcomers into the fold.
Those punk torchbearers are Viagra Boys. From my perspective, they are the greatest punk band on the scene today.
Their recent stop at the Royal Oak Music Theatre in the suburbs of Detroit showed off that they’ve got diehard fans that have been with the Swedish punkers since the beginning as well as a bunch of newcomers.
Back in the day, I would’ve judged newcomers into the punk realm. Now I’m grateful for it -- especially with a band that brings new musical elements into the world of punk, too.
If you blend a mix of early Devo with synths and often dry vocal delivery alongside the saxophone-pilled swagger of Roxy Music if Roxy Music had only released their excellent live album “Viva! Roxy Music” from 1976, you’d get the vast majority of Viagra Boys material, who released this 4th album earlier this year.
From the opening notes of “Man Made Of Meat” to the brooding slowburner “Worms” (which has been a de facto closer for the band), you can hear the muscle of punk and oftentimes metal within their music. But there’s also moments where they’d extend jams from their songs – something I rarely if ever see in punk music – bringing elements like free jazz and techno into their intros and outros.
While everyone is a performer worth watching on stage in the Viagra Boys (multi-instrumentalist Oskar Carls almost takes the cake for his dissociative cigarette-smoking in between blowing on his sax), it’s lead singer Sebastian Murphy who is tough to take your eyes off of.
Completely covered in tattoos and never covered in a T-shirt, Murphy works the stage like a dive bar oracle working the bar, telling stories through his lyrics of being a bad boyfriend (“Ain’t Nice)” to being a punk rock loser (“Punk Rock Loser”). It’s hard to tell what’s true and what’s a parody of the down-and-out characters he sings about, but I’m not sure it really matters where the truth ends and he begins. Like a great actor, he’s convincing.
I could tell there were a lot of new fans in the crowd -- perhaps new to punk entirely -- seemingly by how muted and polite the moshpit was when I got closer to the stage. It wasn’t soft -- it was welcoming.
If the Viagra Boys are helping to usher in a new generation to an old sound, I’m glad they’re the ones to do it.
