The ten best records from the early 2000s Swedish underground

From the sadly departed Studio to the people’s prince of heartbreak Jens Lekman, Service provided the original blueprint that would go on to shape the Swedish underground scene throughout the early 00′s and, in turn, birthed three equally impressive (and inventive) labels – Sincerely Yours, Information and, more recently, US-based Cascine.

Jeff Bratton, Cascine’s founder, ended up running the spin-off label after becoming Service's publicist in the US: “For me as a lover of pop music, Service was one of the most influential European labels of the 2000s. Their vision for the genre was so rogue and so stylish. Service was a lifestyle. Like great labels before them – Creation, Factory, Sarah Records, etc. – a sense of culture existed around Service. This was intriguing. Cascine grew out of this approach – an extension of our admiration of labels with a focused aesthetic.”

Call it what you want (as long as it’s not ‘Balearic’), the tropical undercurrent aligned with naked ambition that rippled through Service’s early output still hits as hard today as it did back in 2001 when Studio released their debut single "The End Of Fame". “Try making a ring tone out of this, you bastards”, they said.

The label made a quiet return this week with a SERV042 - a 7" transparent vinyl in a 294 copy-run that promises "a merging embrace of past and present that brings the future to life". The two-track record presents The Tough Alliance's 'interpretations' of "Stay Awake" and "Take It It’s Yours" – two songs by labelmates The Embassy.

"They are not remixes," explains Borgström in a statement on the label's Instagram account. "It is an intertwining embrace, completely merging the two bands into one of gold. It is the sound of love.

"The Service retrospective has returned me to the label’s body of work with new love and valuation. I understand the ethos and esthetics better now; they appear more radical and consistent from this perspective. The new release at hand affirms that meaning is neither trapped in the past (to which nostalgia or melancholy would be the response), nor is it recovered intact. Instead, we are constantly making new sense of what is given from the past. Consider a hermeneutical circle, not restoring some origin, but creating new meaning. A circular movement, repeating not the same, but difference."

Here, we offer up ten albums from the Service family that attempt to capture the beauty of this indescribable, fluctuating, mad sound that melts our hearts.