Viagra Boys: The Fine Art of Self-Destruction

"I'm just a man made of meat. You're on the internet looking at feet" - Viagra Boys, Man Made of Meat

It was 2021, the height of trap, "urban music" and the Bizarrap Sessions. Most Argentine users on X -- still called Twitter back then -- had declared rock dead. The musical debate revolved around whether "urban music" was the new rock. On one side the old guard, on the other the golden kids who wanted to take over the world.

In this climate of rock's death certificate, one sunny afternoon I visited my friend Augusto, who between joints put on a YouTube video with a mischievous grin and a "Check this out, dude." The first chords hit and I thought: "Son of a bitch, he found it." That's been our whole life: a loop of discovering things, showing them to each other, and waiting a few years for them to blow up.

That was my first contact with Viagra Boys and the conviction that rock wasn't dead but quite the opposite: it was in the middle of a full-blown renaissance. You just had to know where to look.

Everything clicked perfectly. A Swedish post-punk band with an American singer who's heavyset, a tattoo artist, and a Magic: The Gathering player. The music? Enough riffs, distortion, noise, and even progressive elements to leave no room for complaints. Rock-solid from every angle. The differentiator? The saxophone, an instrument that, as you can read in the already cited post about progressive death metal, is experiencing a full-on rediscovery by some European bands.

A sound that immediately reminds us of Los Redondos or Sumo. Which is fitting to mention because the Viagra Boys singer, Sebastian Murphy, also seems deeply committed to the fine art of self-destruction. Or, at the very least, to leaving everything -- absolutely everything -- on stage. Like the bald guy in black sunglasses worshipped by all of Argentine youth -- you get to pick which one we're talking about.

On top of the band's already more-than-enough sound -- enough to build a career on -- and the beastly amounts of energy deployed on stage, you have to add the sharp humor they bring. From the song titles to the albums to the lyrics, everything is precisely laced with measured doses of irony and post-irony. That's no small thing. This is a band that, through humor and self-awareness, demolishes any kind of pretentious standard rock-star pose.

You can quickly get the band's vibe from another one of their instant classics: "Sports", where they list a series of "athletic" activities to do first thing in the morning, around noon:

Smoking dope, short shorts,
Cigarette (wiener dog)
Getting high in the morning
Buying things off the internet

With this explosive combination of rock, self-destruction, and dumb humor, Viagra Boys launched themselves on a successful journey to conquer stages worldwide. And they did so with four studio albums that we'll briefly review below.

Street Worms (2018) & Welfare Jazz (2021)

Street Worms is the band's debut album and in a way works in tandem with the next one, Welfare Jazz. It has some of the flashes that would come later and songs that set the band's course: "Slow Learner", "Sports", and "Just Like You". The title of "Amphetanarchy", which I think is a cool track, foreshadows the kind of wordplay (and idea play) that the band would later turn into a trademark.

Welfare Jazz works as something of a second part to the debut. The quest is the same, the joke is the same, the good songs hit on the same wavelength. "Ain't Nice", "Creatures", and "In Spite of Ourselves", a collaboration with Amyl Taylor from Amyl and the Sniffers -- a band that deserves its own write-up but walks the same path as Viagra Boys, though with a more pronounced punk style. A badass singer with insane stage energy, destined to be another band of the new resurrection.

For those interested, there are also the Shrimp Sessions, which capture the live spirit of Viagra Boys pretty well. I also recommend them because they're a window into one of the band's early obsessions: shrimp.

Cave World (2022)

Cave World was the first Viagra Boys album I was actually anticipating for release, since with the previous ones I wasn't following the band yet. Expectations were high, and not just for us -- the entire rock press had caught on to the phenomenon and placed their bets. The album is conceptual and its theme is isolation and its consequences on the intensification of human stupidity.

"The Cognitive Trade-Off Hypothesis", "Big Boy", "ADD", and "Return to Monke" are tracks whose names could easily pass as chapter titles from Circulo Vicioso. Which says a lot about how all of us were more or less on the same pandemic wavelength, watching monkey memes and yearning to live in a world a bit more basic than the one we got stuck with. The album itself, as a whole, lacks a bit of punch. But it's fine, it's a good release and it left us some bangers. All good.

Viagr Aboys (2025)

I think this is their best album to date. A well-rounded record. While there may not be an abundance of massive hits ("Man Made of Meat", "Uno II", and "You N33d Me" can easily fill that role), it's an album you can listen to from start to finish without even thinking about skipping a track. In this case, while the cohesion isn't as conceptual as Cave World and it isn't built on iconic tracks like the first two albums, the full ride is a 10. It's the most album-album of the four and the one with the most compositional variety, without compromising the band's direction one bit. A mature record, also released on their own label, Shrimp Tech Enterprises.

Viagra Boys in Argentina

After a failed announcement for the first edition of Primavera Sound in our country, the band didn't announce any more dates in Argentina. Since then, several of us have been running a low-to-medium intensity operation to make that possibility happen.

In that crusade I found at least two fellow travelers: the beloved Juan Enrique Ruffo and our musical ambassador Dylan Leon Masa A.K.A. Dillom, who has managed to build something of a friendship with the one and only Sebastian Murphy.

The distance and the band's growing popularity work against us, but I have no doubt they'll eventually set foot on our soil. Efforts to make it happen have been underway for a while, but any information could put them at risk. We just have to trust the process (?).

While we anxiously await the arrival of the band of our time to our country -- which would reach a historic "epic feat" level -- here's a humble playlist so that those of you who haven't fully dived in yet can do so and enjoy Viagra Boys.