There was always an endpoint to ShitKid. Since she was twelve years old, Åsa Söderqvist wanted to be a nurse — she likes routines, "a normal, boring life sometimes." When she started making music as ShitKid in 2016, she gave herself "five to seven years" to be a rockstar first.
Those five years of ShitKid were a whirlwind of chaotic momentum. A whole archive of wildly varied textured material produced at an almost absurd rate: A debut EP recorded on a broken home computer in Gothenburg, where she’d moved after high school to start a feminist punk band. Debut LP Fish — dreamy weirdo pop perfection. The gentler minimalism of the bedroom and-car-recorded This Is It. And [DETENTION], a gloriously unhinged pop-punk record about high school alienation, made with bandmate Lina Molarin Eriksson, steeped in the Green Day and Good Charlotte records they’d loved as teenagers. Then came Duo Limbo / "Mellan himmel å helvete" — ferocious punk recorded in L.A. with the Melvins and in Austin with the Butthole Surfers’ Paul Leary. More EPs and singles scattered along the way. Roskilde, SXSW, Way Out West, The Great Escape. Iggy Pop and Billie Joe Armstrong as fans. "The weirdest musician in Sweden," per Bandcamp. Then, right on schedule, Söderqvist quit.
But the universe had other schemes. While Söderqvist was away — training to be a nurse, as she’d always planned — new listeners dove into the ShitKid catalogue, and a cult following quietly grew bigger and younger and more international than it had ever been while she was active. "Maybe people didn't have time to catch up," she says. "I released a lot of records. And then eventually they found it — and if you grow, more people find you, like some kind of spiral. So I go back to being a rockstar."
2026 marks ten years since that first single, the eternally cool whisper of "Oh Please Be A Cocky Cool Kid." Söderqvist is celebrating with tour dates around the world, starting with a sold-out European tour in the spring — playing including in cities she’s never played before — and two new compilations. The Essential Vol. 1, collects the jagged, sharp, and punchy rock driven highlights, two tracks from each record — the ones that go for the throat. The Essential Vol. 2, due in September, is the other side of ShitKid: the ballads, the slow burns, the wandering melancholic atmospheres. "It's really hard to choose," she says. Together, they map the full picture of one of the strangest, most captivating careers in recent Swedish music. Turns out five to seven years wasn’t quite enough.
