What Drum Days, Guitar Days and Synth Days Say About Saknas by Planetariet
What Drum Days, Guitar Days and Synth Days Say About Saknas by Planetariet
A Swedish Five-Piece Built Its Lost-Astronaut Album One Instrument at a Time
The tracklist of Saknas reads like a mission log. Ten Swedish titles run from Vakuum (vacuum) to Hemlängtan (homesickness), with Sändning 16 (transmission 16), Kontakt and Signal on the way. Planetariet, then a five-piece from Umeå in northern Sweden, released the album on 17 November 2023, and the titles are the only words it needs.
Planetariet’s music is in the playlist below, next to the dream pop and chamber pop records this desk keeps on rotation, and the band’s coverage across our network is collected on Planetariet’s artist profile. Saknas came to AltPop.News through PopHits.Co Music Charts, which verifies independent artists and places their releases across its network of music news desks. Press play on the album, then read on for how it was built.
Saknas Continues the Planetariet Story of an Astronaut, This Time One Who Loses Contact With Earth
The title means “missing”, and the story behind it began years earlier. The band’s first album, Rymden, Swedish for space, followed an astronaut heading out into the unknown. Saknas picks up the same astronaut after an accident cuts the link to Earth. Then it follows the slow fade into the void.
The idea dates from 2015, right after Rymden. Then a self-titled record, planned as a stopgap EP, grew into a full album and took far longer than expected. By the time the band turned back to Saknas, the pandemic had cancelled every gig, so writing was the only thing left to do.
That history explains the shape of the record. The album is instrumental, so the music carries the story and the titles act as the captions. Ingenstans means nowhere. Ge upp means give up, and at under two minutes it is the shortest track on an album that runs to about 44 minutes. The presentation is deliberately spare.
Planetariet Wrote Saknas Layer by Layer, With Separate Days for Drums, Guitars and Synths
The detail that defines this record is the method. For years the band wrote by jamming in the rehearsal room, with songs arriving whole from all five members at once. For Saknas they changed tack, as they explained to Punk Head. They built the songs layer by layer, with drum days, guitar days and synth days for one part at a time.
The five members bring very different ears to those days. Pontus Hedenström and Per Larsson lean towards electronica and neo-classical music, while Pontus Melender likes hip hop and soul. Klas Holmberg follows big-budget pop, and Björn Sundqvist favours knotty, math-like guitar. On the record, Björn Sundqvist plays guitars, synthesizers and electronics, Per Larsson guitars, and Pontus Hedenström guitars, synthesizers and samplers. Klas Holmberg adds synthesizers among his parts, while Pontus Melender plays drums and percussion.
You can hear the layering in how the album opens. Vakuum starts hard, on distorted guitars and heavy drums, then eases into melodic riffs as the other layers arrive. Moment begins from a low, revving drone before the percussion and a brighter melody join it. Meanwhile the closer, Hemlängtan, settles into a steady rhythm under echoing ambience.
Recorded Around Umeå During the Pandemic, Saknas Turns Weekly Rehearsals Into a Wall of Sound
The production is where the lockdown years show. The band recorded the album in different places around Umeå during the pandemic. They also met every week to keep working on it. They have called the rehearsal room a safe fixed point in that period, which suits a record about losing every fixed point.
On stage the same songs get louder. The band describe post-rock as a genre that translates well live. It lets them build walls of sound slowly, then play them at full volume. On the record that build is patient, with jazz and electronica touches folded into the guitar layers rather than placed on top. Mattias Eklund mixed and mastered the album, and the band credit him with pulling a messy record together. A guest player, Nils Andrén, joins them on Moment and Hemlängtan.
A space-themed concept record has a famous precedent in the UK. Public Service Broadcasting built The Race for Space in 2015 around archive recordings from the American and Soviet space programmes. Saknas tells its space story with no archive recordings at all, only titles and arrangement. Fans of Mogwai will also recognise the patience: the Glasgow band has spent three decades proving that instrumental rock can hold a long build.
Where to Hear Saknas by Planetariet, From the Opening Vakuum to the Closing Hemlängtan
Start at the beginning. Vakuum is the most direct way in, and it is the track on our playlist. Then go to Moment for the slow build, and end on Hemlängtan for the release. The album makes most sense in order, as a single story.
The band are aiming the record at listeners in the UK, Germany, France, the Nordic countries and the Baltic states. That fits a sound with roots in Scandinavian post-rock. It was well received on release, with reviews at Illustrate Magazine and We Write About Music.
The story also has a next chapter. Planetariet are now a six-piece on Noon Records, and their next album, Jorden (the Earth), was recorded live to analogue at Atlantis Studios in Stockholm with Anton Sundell producing. It is due in April 2027.
From the AltPop.News curator team: “Most concept albums explain themselves in words. Saknas leaves that job to ten Swedish titles, and that restraint is the most stylish choice on the record.”
The full album plays in the player at the top of this page. Follow Planetariet on Spotify, Apple Music, Bandcamp, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram.
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