Review Fix Exclusive: Pressure’s Olof Jönsson Talks ‘Beaten But Not Dead’ And More

Review Fix chats with Pressure’s Olof Jönsson, who discusses their track, “Beaten But Not Dead,” as well as their goals for the future.

Review Fix: How did the project start?

Olof Jönsson: It all started years ago when Simon became Emil’s guitar teacher. They pretty fast found each other and started playing cover band together in different constellations and a lot of different gigs.

After a few years they got tired of playing covers and started translating and rearrange a lot of new and popular rock/pop songs. 

By this time, they realised that they also wanted a lead singer and they found me Olof. 

When Olof joined the band and we first worked with Simons and Emil’s rewritten covers. But pretty fast we did our first own song, and as soon we started walking that path there was no going back. No more covers. It has taken us about 1-1,5 years to find our sound. We are really proud of it and will probably keep working and develop our sound as time goes on.

Review Fix: What’s your creative process like?

Jönsson: Normally Simon has an idea, for lyrics riffs and melodies. He records and give his ideas to Olof that take a critical look at it, Olof re-records it with his vocals, and pretty often changing the key, lyrics and parts of the melody. (Sometimes almost no changes at all) After that we all start recording together, setting harmonies, take it home and listen to it. Comes up with more ideas/changes, rerecord it. Take it home listen to it… And after a few rounds when we feel, we can’t do it better than this, we record the “final version” and send it to our fantastic producers for mixing and mastering.

Review Fix: What’s your standout song? How was it written?

Jönsson: Our released standout song is actually “Beaten But Not Dead.” Me myself has another favourite but “Beaten” is our most standout song as yet released. It´s a standout because the music is a mixture of folk music, metal, rock and pop in the same song. It’s written from Simons own experiences. A person close to him was going through a really hard time, you can choose to give up lie down and die or keep fighting on.

Review Fix: What are your goals for 2020?

Jönsson: Hehe, it almost finished, but our goals where to release some singles (check) get out and do some live gigs, (no check due to corona) and release our album. We didn’t release the album because all material is not ready yet. We got all the songs ready, but we need to work on the other things around the album release, so we don’t throw a good album away;-)

Review Fix: How do you want your music to affect people?

Jönsson: In two different ways, we want it to help people overcome everyday problems, and we want to start a discussion about topics that sometimes could be hard to talk about. Most of our songs can be interpreted in two different ways, with makes it good for interesting conversations and discussions.

Review Fix: What’s next?

Jönsson: We are about to release a few more singles in a Swedish version and in English version as well. After that we will release our Album. After our album release, we will probably release an EP where we have translated some of our songs to German. If things in the world change, we will definitely start playing live again.