Om Jah Vänder Mig. Kommer Jag Se Dig?: Weatherday Returns

The Scandinavian country of Sweden has affirmed itself as the high priestess of the current cultural canon, birthing artistic epochs such as Draingang’s founder and oracle, Bladee; Ikea’s Swedish Meatballs and reliable deskware; and, most recently, Weatherday’s newest album, Hornet Disaster. 

Weatherday is a Swedish fifth-wave-emo solo artist, also known by the alias Sputnik. Hornet Disaster (2025) is Weatherday’s sophomore album. Their debut album, Come in (2019),  garnered cult-like worship on the far-fletched echelons of High Brow Bandcamp and Music Nerd Reddit. While it draws upon the same lo-fi sensibilities and five-wave-emo influences of Come in, Hornet Disaster offers a more intelligible sound, delivering Weatherday’s artistry by way of a more piercing vessel. 

The album immediately plunges into a dense atmosphere of gnawing guitar chords and overblown drums, establishing a soundscape of a swarm of bees—that titular buzz. Weatherday weaves together alternating volumes and cadences, occasionally parting the curtain of grainy synths for moments of reflective reprieve. “Green Tea Seaweed Sea” allows the crashing instrumentation of the preceding tracks to fade, highlighting the folk qualities of Weatherday’s vocals with Renaissance flute. The first two minutes of the track linger in this shaking folk intonation before exploding into a loud sequence of ascendant riffs, burying Weatherday’s voice yet again in heavy layers of fuzz. 

The record hits a snag when it strays from this dynamism; the last leg of the album becomes repetitive—such a constant thrush of noise and intensity can become overwhelming near the end of the album’s 72-minute runtime. The closing track, “Heaven Smile,” is a glitch-infused synthy finale, which, despite adding to the album’s sonic variance, feels incongruous and untimely, acting as a random stroke of hyper-pop against the procession of an emo album. Similarly, while “Pulka” is uniquely sung in Swedish, Weatherday’s native language, the song itself fails to reach the sonic complexity of earlier tracks, hovering at a constant volume and offering no points of inflection. 

Suddenly and abrasively, a Sheldon Cooper sample sputters into the hornet-swarmed void: “I am overwhelmed / Everything is changing, and it is simply too much.” Despite the seemingly humorous feature from The Big Bang Theory (2007-2019), “Cooperative Calligraphy” is an emotionally intense track. After the initial shock of the sample, the track devolves into Weatherday’s signature grit, a spiraling electric guitar underscoring the bass in Weatherday’s voice. They repeat “You made it easy to miss you,” drawing out the sequence, offering thick margins of breath between each syllable. “Heartbeats” has a similar rhythm, each beat permeating the entire structure of the song as Weatherday’s intonation follows the percussion. 

Hornet Disaster is an anthemic album, each song its own ballad. Weatherday’s raw, emo-inspired vocals unfurl at moments of desperation, using lyrics, often in the form of a question or an answer, as an extension of their remorse and regret: Weatherday screams repeatedly “Are you thinking of me? / I am thinking of you” in “Tiaras” and “You thought that you’d feel something by now / But you don’t” in “Hug.” These repeated lyrics drip with urgency; Weatherday is desperate to be heard. 

Hornet Disaster—although stitched together from a selection of over 70 songs Weatherday has composed over the past six years since Come in—builds a concrete narrative structure against the background of cold Swedish winters, displayed in tracks “Pulka” and “Agatha’s Goldfish.” The lyrics make the album almost cyclical, restating words or objects in new contexts between songs and even albums and past projects. New songs “Heaven Smile” and “Blood Online” both contain images of Weatherday biting through their hands. However, “Heaven Smile” sees the act of biting through skin as congruent to dejection, while the bleeding hands in “Blood Online” represent creative vulnerability, something that Weatherday views as essential to their work. These self-referential motifs indulge the listener further into the Weatherday universe.

Weatherday’s lyricism feels, in moments like “Blood Online,” unbelievably meta. They sing, “I let the blood drip on the screen / I think it makes the words more sweet and genuinely personal.” Weatherday engages with their artistic process, informing the listener about their tactics of creation and synthesis as they witness the main character of Hornet Disaster crumble away and bleed out. 

While Come in laid the foundation for Weatherday’s sound and tone, Hornet Disaster offers Weatherday the space to expand and reflect. With its layered storytelling and instrumentation, Hornet Disaster is a testament to Weatherday’s ability to not only build upon their previous work but also transform it, offering a raw portrait of their artistry and personhood.