Summer Lovin’

How Seven Swedish Teens Became Two Rising Stars

Summer Camp make music about falling in love and coping with heartbreak, their songs will soundtrack your summer if not your life. Their sound mixes the purest forms of pop with a lo-fi fuzz that protects it from being too sugary.

Up until recently the group was thought to consist of seven girls with oversized glasses and very butch haircuts from a faded photo taken at a Swedish Summer Camp, but some snooping worthy of Columbo from The Stool Pigeon has revealed that Summer Camp is actually the work of actress/writer Elizabeth Sankey and musician Jeremy Warmsley (who had already been written off already by most people as just another singer/songwriter after just two albums in four years).

Though one does wonder about the dramatic shift in sound that this is for Jeremy, will he ever return to making heartfelt love songs? He has already been quoted that this is the music he has always wanted to make. “I don’t really feel any connection to my previous work, I was never trying to be a singer/songwriter that was just a label that got attached to me”. This is Elizabeth’s first band and the only time she has sung outside of karaoke.

The duo both have a hand in writing the songs, though they distance themselves from the songs subject matter of broken relationships and falling in love as being autobiographical of their real life relationship, most of time “characters are created for the songs” and they approach a song like “we’re sound tracking a movie of our own”.

They are only now really adjusting to people’s perceptions of them as a brand “everybody is like, is there gonna be an album? We don’t really know, if we record enough songs that are good enough to put on an album”.

For now at least let’s enjoy the gems that Summer Camp have already given us; little bundle of love that is Ghost Train and their fuzzed up cover of the song “I Only Have Eye’s For You” originally by The Lettermen.

Words by Dan Wilkinson
Photos by Dan Wilkinson and Bryan Medina