Kevin Bronson on January 22nd, 2021

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There’s a line of thinking that holds that nobody does pop music right more often than the Swedish.

So welcome back to the landscape, Melpo Mene, aka Erik Mattiasson, the native of Stockholm who made the Aughts better with his 2008 album “Bring the Lions Out,” one of three full-lengths he released between 2004 and 2012. He moved to Los Angeles in 2013 and, seemingly, went underground.

In truth, he’s been busy doing co-writes and composing music for commercials rather than worrying about doing the industry hustle for his own music.

But the first proper Melpo Mene single in eight years, “Get A Rocket,” arrived last October, followed by “Once Had It All” in December and, today, “All of This Is True,” an introspective pop gem he tag-teams with Spanish singer Russian Red. If only existential crises could always be this warm and melodious.

“All of our feelings have been felt countless times by the people before us,” Mene says of the new single. “While we take ourselves quite seriously — ‘Should I give my rose to Bob or Billy?’, ‘Am I different from my friends?’, ‘Why am I so scattered?’ — you can find comfort in the fact that you are dead center exactly what everyone before you was, and everything is under control, maybe even too much so.”

The singles are part of a full-length the artist has in the works for later this year; stay tuned for details.

||| Stream: “All of This Is True” (feat. Russian Red)

||| Also: Stream: “Once Had It All” and “Get a Rocket”