tibia - See what heaven looks like now
WIFE
- 1For You - Intro
- 2Mary's Lifestyle
- 3Two weeks of Gloria
- 4Molly in Mexico
- 5Walk on Candy
- 6Sally, when the morning comes
- 7Loud with you (Angel)
- 8My strange house / Cover Girl
- 9Rock and Roll, Summer
- 10Please Hold - Outro
005
•
Open edition
Released March 14, 2025
tibia – ”See what heaven looks like now” BIO
Life is short, times are hard, and no-one ever really knows what’s around the corner. What’s the answer, then? For Stockholm duo tibia, it’s to put on your hottest outfit, throw caution to the wind and turn your small corner of the universe into a big party. “We’ve created a world that we can enter and then just run amok in without any obligations or walls to break down because the walls are already broken,” says Vide Willemark of the band’s ethos. Co-conspirator Elias Sahlin sums it up succinctly: “We’ve always just been looking for more fun.”
Arriving at the perfect time, following a summer when the cultural world decided to collectively embrace hedonism and adventure more than ever, the seeds of tibia began way before that, when Vide and Elias had to make their own fun. Best friends from the age of 15, when Vide would travel in from the suburbs and crash on Elias’ city floor (“Since then we have a really strong give-take relationship where I take and Elias gives - it’s perfect,” Vide chuckles), the two have a magnetic kind of bond: even when one drifts away for a few years, the force of their brotherly chemistry can’t help but pull them back together.
In the early days of that friendship, the pair would storm around their local streets, listening to Nirvana and Suicide and the ‘00s indie of the time. Getting the night bus to underground parties on industrial estates, even as underage teens they were always in search of excitement. “There’s a curiosity in it to see how you can shape your life - that it’s not only what you’re given but that you can also create your own life too,” Vide says. “We were both wanting to feel that life was big, and we probably still are in a way.”
Over the years, both continued pursuing the magic down their own separate paths. For Elias, it was always in music; as a successful songwriter and artist making electronic soul, he’s been nominated for two Swedish GRAMMY Awards. Vide, meanwhile, has lived something of a nomadic existence, writing songs, travelling the world and “falling in love over and over again”. The two, however, had never considered coming together for a project until one fateful evening when, reunited once more and drinking the world to rights, they started mucking around and writing a song. One song became five; the next night, they wrote five more. “Some of them were amazing and some were fucking trash but that was the whole point,” laughs Vide. “We started creating a safe space parallel universe where we can be ugly together and say whatever we like, and then we go gold digging into it all to find the good bits.”
The gold, for tibia, invariably comes from exactly this sense of spontaneity and curiosity. The two friends (both frontmen and guitarists) see the world as a well of potential - for high jinx, for love, for regrets that will at least make good anecdotes in the morning - and their music rings with those feelings. Debut single ‘Two weeks of Gloria’, with its scuzzy vocal delivery and Beck-like dirty glamour, was the first track they ever wrote: a distillation of a hundred nights spent in trashy bars, meeting a cast of mates and miscreants along the way. “We had so much to say because we’d been living this lifestyle, so everything just came out,” recalls Elias. “Gloria is probably everyone we met, in a way. She’s a symbol.”
‘Two weeks of Gloria’ also blessed them with two even more permanent markers of their burgeoning project. Its central lyric, “see what heaven looks like now”, has become both the title of the duo’s incoming debut album and a tattoo that both musicians got inked during an impromptu 5am sesh in a stranger’s apartment. Elias’ is etched between his shoulder blades, and as for his partner in crime? “Vide’s is a tramp stamp,” he notes with the amused look of a man who clearly feels good about his own choices.
Written between Elias’s apartment and Vide’s studio, with lyrics and ideas almost always hashed out over beers and shots in local drinking holes (“Every bar is like a pirate ship in a way, and who doesn’t want to be a pirate?” shrugs Vide by way of explanation), ‘See what heaven looks like now’ is a rough-edged and reckless document of tibia’s first year. It’s chock full of hooks - take the effervescent indie bounce of second single ‘Mary’s lifestyle’ or the almost early Killers-esque melodies of ‘Molly in Mexico’ - but it’s also a little bit grizzled, a little bit fuzzy from the night before; for Elias and Vide, the beauty is in straddling both. “We don’t want it to be too pretty because we’re pretty enough…” Vide winks. “Nothing in life is ever only pretty and cute; there’s always that broken layer that keeps filtering its way through for us.”
On ‘Loud With You (Angel)’, the pair recruited producer August Vinberg to join the gang. Bringing in a more sample-led approach, his new eyes gave a vital sense of immediacy to a song about going all-in. “It’s the only song without live drums. We wanted it to feel really hard-hitting from the get-go and like a refreshing slap in the face because it’s all about wanting to get loud with someone in whatever way that may be,” says Elias. “It can be sex, it can be a high, it can be in the club, but it’s just about really wanting something to happen and going for it.” Elsewhere, with the fizzing guitars of ‘Walk on Candy’, the pair serve up a heartfelt missive to any kid feeling misunderstood “in a small town who wants to get the fuck out of there”, while ‘Sally, when morning comes’ marks a different kind of curveball: a sort of anti-hangover ballad that, instead, suggests everything will be OK in the clear light of the morning.
Having already begun to forge a raucous live reputation on home turf with a string of wild bar shows and, recently, a pair of dates supporting Royel Otis, tibia have been carving out a corner of Stockholm that sounds like the best night out you never had. With ‘See what heaven looks like now’ and everything else set to follow, Vide and Elias are throwing open the doors and inviting the world in to join them.
“When you listen to tibia, we want it to be like putting on your coolest pair of jeans, doing a smokey eyeshadow and feeling sexy. We want it to give you that confidence,” Vide says. “We asked ourselves before, what would the dream be? And we said the dream is us being in a random city, walking past a random park where there’s five misfit teens drinking their parents’ wine and we hear them playing our song. That’s the dream.” Fun, freeing and full of the giddy, messy joys of living life to its largest, tibia might be a mother’s nightmare but they’re a hedonist’s ideal. See you at the bar, then?
tibia – ”See what heaven looks like now” BIO
Life is short, times are hard, and no-one ever really knows what’s around the corner. What’s the answer, then? For Stockholm duo tibia, it’s to put on your hottest outfit, throw caution to the wind and turn your small corner of the universe into a big party. “We’ve created a world that we can enter and then just run amok in without any obligations or walls to break down because the walls are already broken,” says Vide Willemark of the band’s ethos. Co-conspirator Elias Sahlin sums it up succinctly: “We’ve always just been looking for more fun.”
Arriving at the perfect time, following a summer when the cultural world decided to collectively embrace hedonism and adventure more than ever, the seeds of tibia began way before that, when Vide and Elias had to make their own fun. Best friends from the age of 15, when Vide would travel in from the suburbs and crash on Elias’ city floor (“Since then we have a really strong give-take relationship where I take and Elias gives - it’s perfect,” Vide chuckles), the two have a magnetic kind of bond: even when one drifts away for a few years, the force of their brotherly chemistry can’t help but pull them back together.
In the early days of that friendship, the pair would storm around their local streets, listening to Nirvana and Suicide and the ‘00s indie of the time. Getting the night bus to underground parties on industrial estates, even as underage teens they were always in search of excitement. “There’s a curiosity in it to see how you can shape your life - that it’s not only what you’re given but that you can also create your own life too,” Vide says. “We were both wanting to feel that life was big, and we probably still are in a way.”
Over the years, both continued pursuing the magic down their own separate paths. For Elias, it was always in music; as a successful songwriter and artist making electronic soul, he’s been nominated for two Swedish GRAMMY Awards. Vide, meanwhile, has lived something of a nomadic existence, writing songs, travelling the world and “falling in love over and over again”. The two, however, had never considered coming together for a project until one fateful evening when, reunited once more and drinking the world to rights, they started mucking around and writing a song. One song became five; the next night, they wrote five more. “Some of them were amazing and some were fucking trash but that was the whole point,” laughs Vide. “We started creating a safe space parallel universe where we can be ugly together and say whatever we like, and then we go gold digging into it all to find the good bits.”
The gold, for tibia, invariably comes from exactly this sense of spontaneity and curiosity. The two friends (both frontmen and guitarists) see the world as a well of potential - for high jinx, for love, for regrets that will at least make good anecdotes in the morning - and their music rings with those feelings. Debut single ‘Two weeks of Gloria’, with its scuzzy vocal delivery and Beck-like dirty glamour, was the first track they ever wrote: a distillation of a hundred nights spent in trashy bars, meeting a cast of mates and miscreants along the way. “We had so much to say because we’d been living this lifestyle, so everything just came out,” recalls Elias. “Gloria is probably everyone we met, in a way. She’s a symbol.”
‘Two weeks of Gloria’ also blessed them with two even more permanent markers of their burgeoning project. Its central lyric, “see what heaven looks like now”, has become both the title of the duo’s incoming debut album and a tattoo that both musicians got inked during an impromptu 5am sesh in a stranger’s apartment. Elias’ is etched between his shoulder blades, and as for his partner in crime? “Vide’s is a tramp stamp,” he notes with the amused look of a man who clearly feels good about his own choices.
Written between Elias’s apartment and Vide’s studio, with lyrics and ideas almost always hashed out over beers and shots in local drinking holes (“Every bar is like a pirate ship in a way, and who doesn’t want to be a pirate?” shrugs Vide by way of explanation), ‘See what heaven looks like now’ is a rough-edged and reckless document of tibia’s first year. It’s chock full of hooks - take the effervescent indie bounce of second single ‘Mary’s lifestyle’ or the almost early Killers-esque melodies of ‘Molly in Mexico’ - but it’s also a little bit grizzled, a little bit fuzzy from the night before; for Elias and Vide, the beauty is in straddling both. “We don’t want it to be too pretty because we’re pretty enough…” Vide winks. “Nothing in life is ever only pretty and cute; there’s always that broken layer that keeps filtering its way through for us.”
On ‘Loud With You (Angel)’, the pair recruited producer August Vinberg to join the gang. Bringing in a more sample-led approach, his new eyes gave a vital sense of immediacy to a song about going all-in. “It’s the only song without live drums. We wanted it to feel really hard-hitting from the get-go and like a refreshing slap in the face because it’s all about wanting to get loud with someone in whatever way that may be,” says Elias. “It can be sex, it can be a high, it can be in the club, but it’s just about really wanting something to happen and going for it.” Elsewhere, with the fizzing guitars of ‘Walk on Candy’, the pair serve up a heartfelt missive to any kid feeling misunderstood “in a small town who wants to get the fuck out of there”, while ‘Sally, when morning comes’ marks a different kind of curveball: a sort of anti-hangover ballad that, instead, suggests everything will be OK in the clear light of the morning.
Having already begun to forge a raucous live reputation on home turf with a string of wild bar shows and, recently, a pair of dates supporting Royel Otis, tibia have been carving out a corner of Stockholm that sounds like the best night out you never had. With ‘See what heaven looks like now’ and everything else set to follow, Vide and Elias are throwing open the doors and inviting the world in to join them.
“When you listen to tibia, we want it to be like putting on your coolest pair of jeans, doing a smokey eyeshadow and feeling sexy. We want it to give you that confidence,” Vide says. “We asked ourselves before, what would the dream be? And we said the dream is us being in a random city, walking past a random park where there’s five misfit teens drinking their parents’ wine and we hear them playing our song. That’s the dream.” Fun, freeing and full of the giddy, messy joys of living life to its largest, tibia might be a mother’s nightmare but they’re a hedonist’s ideal. See you at the bar, then?
