Sløtface @ 7th St 1/18/18

Howdy, kids! Got Any Tunes is back from break! Last night, after a series of unfortunate and then later fortunate events, I saw Sløtface (pronounced “Slutface”). It was the Norwegian punk band’s first time in the Minnesota, and although the crowd was small, the fans, like myself, were happy they finally stopped here.

After immediately clearing up confusion about the pronunciation of their name by request of a woman in the crowd, Sløtface jumped right into tracks off their 2017 LP, Try Not To Freak Out, the audience singing “Patti Smith would never put up with this shit!” right along with front-woman Haley Shea. They continued through a shuffled version of Try Not To Freak Out, adding a couple older songs here and there, along with a spoken word intermission clip from Nina Simone midway through the set.

You can make your own decisions based on the photos below, but I think the drummer, Halvard Skeie Wiencke, looks kind of like Ansel Elgort and he kept either making faces at me or really intense eye contact – hard one to read. Haley made jokes about the Superbowl saying, “this is all new to us, we don’t do this in Norway.” Their bassist, Lasse Lokøy, jumped into the crowd during “Sponge State,” a song that name drops Bon Iver.

Sløtface graciously closed the night without an encore, which I appreciated – bands should just play their set all the way through, its an old trope leaving the stage only to come back and play a couple more songs. I would like to make it a point that the first song that came over the house speakers when their set was over was Wheatus’ “Teenage Dirtbag,” but the best part was that it was a part of their written set list. They picked it.