Teamwork makes the dream work. As told by Kate Boy.
This is Kate Boy, a Swedish electro-pop trio known for precision-crafted pop songs presented with panache.
Bandmates Kate Akhurst, Markus Dextegen, and Hampus Nordgren Hemlin met for drinks in Stockholm one night in 2012 after being introduced by a mutual friend. They hit it off instantly and recorded their first song together that same night, still buzzing from the bar room banter.
Kate Boy
Any band is a long-term relationship between its members, but Kate Boy is unusually egalitarian. Akhurst, Dextegen, and Hemlin write and produce every song as a team, even alternating who plays what instrument.
"Our goal with everything we do is to try and make something that we wouldn’t have expected ourselves to be able to pull off," says Dextegen.
Given the chance to choose your partner(s), go for humility over similarity.
The ideal partner understands the spirit of collaboration and isn't too prideful about their own ideas. If that key criterion is met, it's not so important that you have a ton of things in common. In fact, differences can be an advantage. In the case of Kate Boy, Akurst comes from a singer-songwriter background, Dextegen is a house music and techno aficionado, and Hemlin grew up on '70s rock.
"The more different, the better, I think," says Dextegen. Akhurst agrees. "They can be extremely different from you — and that's a good thing because then you're going to make something you would never have made on your own," she says.