Miynt
Wednesday, June 18, 19:00adv £17
To make Rain Money Dogs, Miynt had to take the plunge – quite literally. A spur-of-the- moment solo trip to a secluded island on the Stockholm Archipelago would change the course of the Swedish songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and producer’s kaleidoscopic third LP entirely. It was here where, in the balmy days of late summer 2024, Miynt (born Fredrika Ribbing) crafted her most ambitious record yet, in between nature spotting and swimming in the ocean until the sun set.
Working alone, Ribbing felt herself learning to trust her instincts; to be at ease with the more experimental direction in which her music was going. Having put together a small home studio set-up, she spent 10 days writing and embracing the joy of exploring “wild” guitar solos, growing more self-assured and confident in her new material by the hour.
The songs themselves – which oscillate between spacey, scuzzy introspection and indie propulsion – evoke this emergence from uncertainty to a more self-assured mindset. Set to arrive on May 30th, 2025 via indie stalwart B3SCI, Rain Money Dogs is a declarative statement of purpose, one which sees Ribbing fully take the reins on production duties for the first time in her career, leaving her feeling “more content and authentically myself than ever before,” she says.
These creative shifts for Ribbing have felt both macro and micro, and have found her reckoning with her musical past. With a melancholic cover of Britney Spears’ ‘Baby One More Time…’, as well as 2016’s EP No.1 – a collection of electro-flecked pop songs recorded in Los Angeles – she caught the ear of critics, appearing in i-D, The Fader, and Stereogum, among others.
From then on, her output remained relatively slight while she worked on experimenting with new moods and textures in her work. “When I started out making music, I was so focused on making everything so precise,” explains Ribbing. “But my journey since has been about viewing things as an ongoing art project and not aiming for perfection.”
Follow-up LP Stay On Your Mind leant into distorted guitar and psych-y territory, à la The Marias or Pearl Charles, while 2022’s Lonely Beach scaled the bruising emotions of Lana Del Rey’s Ultraviolence. The latter led to a P3 Guld nomination (Sweden’s answer to the Grammys) and its lead single ‘A Bite Of Papaya’ featured in hit Netflix series Elite.
Through it all, Ribbing has remained endlessly curious, choosing to scan her inner horizons for material to satisfy her experimental tendencies. Nowhere is this continued exploration of self-expression and deep feeling more apparent than on Rain Money Dogs. Musically, it’s a deft blend of indie and brooding atmospherics, resulting in something that is as accessible as it is adventurous. Ribbing sings in a tone that’s both deadpan and empathetic without veering into sentimentality; she can lift your spirits without even trying to.
Ribbing points to visionaries such as Björk and the late filmmaker David Lynch as some of her inspirations, as well as the generational Swedish pop singer Doris Svensson, whose
1970 LP “Did You Give The World Some Love Today’ heavily influenced Rain Money Dogs. The subject matter of her new album, meanwhile, reflects on a tenor of paranoia that pervades the current zeitgeist: from doomscrolling and AI to the global epidemic of loneliness.
The questions posed throughout these 11 songs may be painful at root level, though Ribbing’s poetic, impressionistic, and wonderfully strange songwriting allows for an air of levity to cut through her work.
Its themes are too kaleidoscopic to be reduced to simple social commentary, Ribbing posits. “My thoughts on what’s happening at the moment aren’t necessarily very clear, it is a confusing time to be alive,” she says. “From a lack of connection between each other to contending with living in an ever-changing world, all of that is reflected in my songwriting”. While much of the album is open for interpretation, ‘I Am I Am What’ delights with a direct reference to The Beatles, a cornerstone of Ribbing’s primary form of musical education: her father’s vinyl collection. Mixing the playful with the devastating, ‘Car Crash In The Blue’ coasts on cathartic waves of wild, imagined scenarios. ‘Öppna brev’ was born from a P3 Radio interview where Ribbing was encouraged to “finally” record a song in Swedish – instead, she trusted her own inclinations and wound up doing the opposite, crafting a gauzy interlude track that relishes raw creativity.
Recording a myriad of instruments herself became an important full-circle moment for Ribbing. A teenager obsessed with David Bowie and The Strokes, she learned how to play guitar at age 15, but seeing her school peers perform in punk bands made her feel as though she was “seriously falling behind”.
She adds: “I had to overcome a lot of psychological hurdles before I told myself, ‘No, I can do this.’ Music felt like my own secret world, but I wanted to start letting other people in.” These days, she credits the freedom of her globetrotting early twenties – which saw Ribbing hop between Los Angeles, London, and Stockholm, juggling studio sessions with selling her own oil paintings – as playing a key role in the creative epiphanies she has been able to unlock since.
For Ribbing, continuing to find and articulate her identity as a musician felt like a big deal even in the smallest moments of making her new album. Rain Money Dogs is a deeply personal record, yet it is universally resonant, holding the mirror up to this ascendant star and to the world around her.
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