First Aid Kit, A Swedish Phenomenon, Picked Their Name Randomly From A Dictionary

First Aid Kit makes some rather incredible music, if you haven’t heard any of it. Just listen to this song, which was released almost two years.

These two sisters began their careers when the younger of the two was just 14. They come from a musical and artistic family, but they didn’t really even start actively doing anything musical until 2005. That’s when Klara Söderberg, then 12, first heard the band Bright Eyes, which led her down a musical journey through Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Emmylou Harris, and others. That year, she got a guitar for Christmas. The single biggest influence on her was the soundtrack to the movie O Brother, Where Art Thou?

The two of them picked up the music so fast and so well that their father, who was in a band before either of them was born, admitted to being jealous of their talent. In 2007, the pair began uploading music to MySpace under the band name First Aid Kit, which they truly just found by opening a dictionary.

They have played Austin City Limits and numerous other festivals and have slowly been making ground internationally. The Stockholm natives were one of five groups nominated as Best International Band at the 2015 Brit Awards.

When they were ‘discovered’ in 2007, another Swedish band you might know, The Knife, heard them and decided that they ‘had to be saved from bad deals with the [music] industry.’ So they found them a good record deal that allowed them to keep their artistic integrity and shortly thereafter began touring, before they even graduated from high school.

I really enjoy their music and hope they keep on keeping on, as they say.