SHITKID

There was always an end date for ShitKid. Since she was twelve years old, Åsa Söderqvist wanted to become a nurse – she likes routines, "a normal and sometimes boring life." When she launched her music project ShitKid in 2016, she had given herself "five to seven years" to live out her rockstar dream first.

Those five years under the name ShitKid were a true creative whirlwind. An impressive collection of tracks with extremely varied textures and styles, produced at an almost absurd pace: a debut EP recorded on a broken home computer in Gothenburg, where she had moved after high school to start a feminist punk band; then the album Fish, a marvel of dreamy and quirky pop; then the softer minimalism of This Is It, recorded between her bedroom and her car; then [DETENTION], a delightfully wacky pop-punk record about feeling excluded in high school, made with her bandmate Lina Molarin Eriksson and fueled by the Green Day and Good Charlotte albums they adored as teenagers.

Then came Duo Limbo / Mellan himmel å helvete, fierce punk recorded in Los Angeles with the Melvins and then in Austin with Paul Leary of the Butthole Surfers. Other EPs and singles marked the journey. Roskilde, SXSW, Way Out West, The Great Escape. Admirers like Iggy Pop and Billie Joe Armstrong. "Sweden's weirdest musician," according to Bandcamp. Then, exactly as planned, Söderqvist stopped.

But the universe had other plans. While Söderqvist was pursuing her nursing training, as she had always envisioned, new listeners dived into ShitKid's catalog. Gradually, a fan base grew, becoming larger, younger, and more international than it had ever been when she was still active.

"Maybe people just didn't have time to keep up," she explains. "I released a massive amount of records. Then, eventually, they discovered them. And when you start growing, more and more people find you, sort of like in a spiral. So I'm becoming a rockstar again."

The year 2026 will mark the tenth anniversary of the release of her debut single, the eternally cool Oh Please Be A Cocky Cool Kid. To celebrate this anniversary, Söderqvist will embark on an already sold-out European tour, including dates in cities where she has never performed before, and will release two new compilations.

The Essential Vol. 1 gathers the most incisive, punchy, and energetic tracks from her rock repertoire: two tracks selected from each of her records, the ones that hit straight to the point. The Essential Vol. 2, expected in September, will unveil the other side of ShitKid: the ballads, the slow-burn tracks, and the melancholic, wandering atmospheres.

"It's really hard to choose," she confides.

Together, these two compilations paint the complete portrait of one of the most singular and fascinating careers in recent Swedish music. In the end, five to seven years were not enough.