ShitKid

For ShitKid, there was always an end. Since she was twelve years old, Åsa Söderqvist wanted to become a nurse - she likes routines, "a normal, sometimes boring life". When she started making music as ShitKid in 2016, she initially gave herself "five to seven years" to become a rock star.

Those five years as ShitKid were a whirlwind of chaotic dynamics. A whole archive of material with wildly varying textures, 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 form a feminist punk band. The debut album "Fish", [DETENTION], a wonderfully disturbing pop-punk album about alienation in high school. Then came "Duo Limbo / 'Mellan himmel å helvete'" - wild punk, recorded in L.A. with the Melvins and in Austin with Paul Leary from the Butthole Surfers. More EPs and singles scattered along the way in between. "The weirdest musician in Sweden", according to Bandcamp. Then, right on schedule, Söderqvist quit.

But fate had other plans. While Söderqvist was away - she was training to be a nurse, as she had always planned - new listeners pounced on the ShitKid repertoire, and a cult following quietly grew, becoming younger and more international than it had ever been when Söderqvist was still active. "Maybe people just didn't have time to catch up," she says. "I released a lot of records. And then they finally discovered it - and when you grow, more people find you, like in a kind of spiral. So I'm a rock star again."

2026 marks the tenth anniversary of the release of that first single, the eternally cool whisper of "Oh Please Be A Cocky Cool Kid". Söderqvist is celebrating with a sold-out European tour - including in cities where she has never played before - and two new compilations. "The Essential Vol. 1" collects the edgy, sharp and punchy rock highlights, two tracks per record - the ones that go straight for the throat. "The Essential Vol. 2", which is due to be released in September, is the other side of ShitKid: the ballads, the slowly building tracks, the wandering melancholic moods. "It's really hard to make a selection," she says. Together they paint the complete picture of one of the strangest and most captivating careers in the recent Swedish music scene. As it turns out, five to seven years wasn't quite enough.

ShitKid is now back in 2026. After a quickly sold-out concert in Berlin in March, she is coming to Cologne, Berlin and Hamburg in June and to Mainz and Munich in September.

The tour is presented by Rausgegangen and ByteFM.