About a half a decade ago, a burgeoning band was sitting around with pals at Blecktornskällaren, a Stockholm bar, trying to figure out what to call themselves. Back then, any potential spam filter troubles were “pretty far from my mind,” says Sebastian Murphy, this outfit’s lead singer. What was bothering him was “trying to come up with as extreme a name as possible.” Then, a deus ex machina. One of the friends happened to be taking Viagra at the time and bellowed, “You guys should be called Viagra Boys.”
“And I was like,” Murphy pauses, echoing a beat of reflection from that pivotal moment, “yeah, that’s a pretty good idea.”
They had, arbitrarily, wanted “boys” in their name. Any audible overlap with Vengaboys—best known for the song “We Like To Party,” from the album The Party Album!—did not cross their mind. They couldn’t see anything obviously offensive about Viagra Boys. “So we just went with it,” says Murphy.
In the years since, Viagra Boys have put out two lauded albums, 2018’s Street Worms and 2021’s Welfare Jazz, full of talky, deadpan, surreal punk. (If I Think You Should Leave was a band, that band could do a split EP with Viagra Boys). On their first song to gain traction, 2018’s “Sports,” Murphy opens by chanting the words “Baseball / basketball / wiener dog / short shorts / cigarette / surfboard / ping pong / rugby ball / wiener dog / skiing, down on the beach / ssssports.” Believe me, it is a banger. After their third album, Cave World, drops July 8, they’ll be touring festivals all over the world. And all of that has happened despite these guys having what could objectively be called a stupid fucking name.
The misunderstandings began immediately after they formed. “We had a Facebook page, and we were getting all sorts of weird DMs from men all over the world,” says Murphy. “They were like, ‘How much to buy?’ They thought we were some sort of vendors.” And then they’d have the same conversation over and over again. “‘We sent you guys an email.’ ‘No, you didn’t.’ Everything ended up in spam.” Now, clunkily, every promo email from the band promises material from ““V**gra Boys” and then immediately explains “(**="ia" because spam FILTERS).”
Says the band’s publicist, Ryan Cunningham, “For the past four years I’ve only used that. Their manager, Oskar Ekman, advised me from day one to never write the actual band name in an email. During an album campaign, I check my spam as regularly as my inbox.”
Adds Ekman, over email, with a distinct air of resignation, “People make weird assumptions when you have a dumb name like Viagra Boys. I’ve had to turn down hundreds of shows with different crotch rock bands over the years. I think the intellectual side of VB often gets overlooked or misunderstood.”
Maybe there’s something depressing here, the self-imposed, nonsensical constriction. But there’s something admirable about it, too. The workaday nature of it all. The hard graft. It sounds funny on the surface, but this is these people’s jobs. They promote a great band that they love, and the name of that band is Viagra Boys.
For the band itself, the secret to success with a name like that seems to be not caring too much. They all still work intermittent day jobs. (Said jobs include tattooing, carpentry, janitoring, and cooking.) As far as their internet presence, they’re happily ignorant. Murphy says he checks the act’s Instagram but never Googles the band. (WIRED did and received no ads for pills, just links to Viagra Boys’ music and social media profiles. Their SEO is strong.) All in all, he admits, “I haven’t really thought about it that much.” The conversation we’re having, though, does remind him of their set at Coachella earlier this year. Playing that festival can be a career-defining moment for a lot of bands—and, in a roundabout way, it was for Viagra Boys, too. “It felt like there were 20 people there that knew who we were,” Murphy says.
So naturally, “the other 1,500 teenagers” must have been there because of the name. Online, being called Viagra Boys might not make a lick of sense. But in person, there it was: human connection. Which makes Murphy quite happy. “If I was younger and I walked by some poster and it said ‘Viagra Boys’—I would definitely check that out.”
As for what other names were kicked around on that long-ago day at Blecktornskällaren—what other paths these eternal Viagra Boys may well have traveled—Murphy laughs. “I can’t tell you,” he says, “I’m sorry. Not a chance.”
On one item, though, we do have some closure. The Viagra-reliant buddy? The one who came up with the name? “He’s not using it anymore. It was just a short-term thing. Due to his use of amphetamines.”
