Where Are We?

Stockholm instrumentalists Gösta Berlings Saga are back and celebrating 25 years of heady musical adventures with their seventh album, Forever Now. Driven by a thrill-seeking wanderlust to explore new sounds and the desire to remain recognisable, the band tell Prog they're always searching for something new, even if they're not actually sure what that is.

- Phil Weller

These last few years have been pretty tough for us," sighs Alexander Skepp, Gösta Berlings Saga's drummer and co-founding member.

Alongside keyboardist David Lundberg, he's seen the band's fortunes rise and fall like the Baltic Sea that laps against their home city. “We were locked and loaded to tour [sixth album] Konkret Music in 2020, and then [laughs]... things happened.”

A record rich in shorter songs that bottled their acid-laced, jam-heavy progressive jazz identity never got the celebration it deserved. The story of Forever Now, then, reads like a redemption arc. Under Pelagic Records' banner, a new era dawns.

“The album title refers to many things, but it’s something that we hear quite often from people: ‘When I hear your music or go to a show, it feels like time freezes and I’m in that moment.’

“The ‘now’,” Skepp adds, “is like a vacuum chamber. Several of us have lost close family members recently. We wanted to recreate that feeling of being in that current now. You never know if there's going to be a next album. No one can guarantee that. We went in with everything we had.”

Knowing which direction to take the record in proved tricky. There was talk, Skepp says, of countering Konkret Musik with “a proper, old-school progressive rock album like early Genesis. No one would have expected that.” But the concept felt contrived.

“We never have a plan,” he continues, “and that’s where problems arise, and opportunities come from. We’re always searching for something new, but we’re not always sure what we’re looking for.”

Over the five years spent writing Forever Now, there was a peculiar push and pull between bandmembers and the two-headed beast that is their mindset. An innate desire to explore new ideas sparred with the fear of losing their psychedelic and deliciously weird identity by changing so much.