Lukas Graham’s viral hit, “ 7 Years,” sounds somewhere between Passenger and Dirty Projectors. The song’s lyrics deliver a cinematic nostalgia, the kind of longing that’s captured in the single’s album art: a photograph of an old man and young boy lying together on some bluffs, looking out at the Irish seascape.
The band consists of frontman Lukas Graham Forchhammer, drummer Mark Falgren, bassist Magnus Larsson, and keyboardist Kasper Daugaard. They’ve been big in Scandinavia since 2012, when their debut, self-titled album went quadruple-platinum in Denmark. Today, listeners outside of Europe are starting to catch on. In an interview with Genius, Forchhammer said that the photograph is of his now-deceased father—but admitted that the boy in the photo is a childhood friend, not him. Lukas also shed some light on his band’s music in Genius annotations on several top tracks.
Here’s 5 things you need to know about Lukas.
His biggest critic is his mom. “She can always hear when I’m uncomfortable,” he said in an annotation on the song “ Happy Home,” adding “she won’t be mean about it.”
His first job was … collecting bottles. “We could make like $200 in a week,” he said in reference to the line “ Never rich so we were out to make that steady figure” on the song “ 7 Years.”
Lukas had a bohemian phase “ learning Spanish, writing songs, and drinking wine” in Argentina’s Buenos Aires.“ He then “realized he wanted to have a live band” and moved back to Denmark.
He’s into 2Pac. Lukas annotated the first verse of Pac’s “Life Goes On,” the lyrics of which he said resonated with his own experience growing up in the relatively lawless Christiania neighborhood of Denmark’s Copenhagen.
He’s not into gossip, and to truly understand him “you just need to come to Copenhagen.”
—Peter Nowogrodzki
