The Search and the Cost of Indulgence, Two Decades After the Near Miss
A Swedish Band That Became One Man’s Project, Then Became A Band Again
The Search came close in Uppsala in the early 2000s and did not get through. For most of the years after that, the name belonged to one person. Indulgence, out since 4 October 2024, is the second album made since the band reassembled around him, and what makes it worth hearing is what two decades of working without a result did to the writing.
The Search have tracks in the playlist below, and this desk’s coverage of the band is collected on the profile for The Search. Indulgence reached BestRock.News through PopHits.Co Music Charts, which verifies independent artists and places their releases across its network of music news sites. Press play, then read on.
What The Search Built Before Indulgence
Razmig Tekeyan sings, plays guitar and has carried the name since the start. The band dates itself to 1999. When it stopped being a band, he kept releasing under the name anyway. That one detail explains most of what follows.
The catalogue makes the point better than a biography would. Fifteen releases sit on the band’s own Bandcamp page. They start with The Search in 2004 and run through Bloodbathe & Bazaar Of Lush Loose Limbs in 2006, Deranged Minds Unite in 2007, Saturnine Songs in 2008, Staying Alive In A Country Industrialized in 2012, Our Need For Solace in 2014, Songs About Losers in 2016, Echo in 2017 and A Wave From The Sidelines in 2018. None of them made the name widely known. He recorded the next one each time.
Most people treat Heart’s Racing in 2020 as the high point of the solo stretch. In 2022 the project became a group again and put out Extras. Four people made Indulgence: Tekeyan on vocals and guitar, Måns Hartman on bass, Stephen Burt on lead guitar and Johann Bernövall on drums.
The Constraint Behind The Record
Aenaos Records put the album out. It is an independent label, not a major. The record reached most of its listeners through Bandcamp and SoundCloud long before it reached anyone through a playlist. There was no budget to chase a radio edit, and no particular reason to write one.
That matters, because you can hear the alternative on plenty of records by bands in the same position. A group that half expects to be discovered writes a song that plans for it. The chorus arrives early. The hook repeats past the point of use. None of that happens here. Tekeyan writes as though he already knows who is listening, which is a smaller and more forgiving assumption, and it loosens the arrangements.
The band still ran a proper campaign, which cuts against the idea that independent means unplanned. Pick Me Up went out as the first single on 16 August 2024. You Just Want Somebody To Hold You followed on 13 September. The album landed on 4 October. Three dates, six weeks, no fuss. The Search built Indulgence to that schedule and then let the record do the rest.
How Indulgence Is Put Together
Ten tracks, running to a little under thirty-eight minutes: Silhouette, You Just Want Somebody To Hold You, Smooth Skin, I Want To Find Sanctuary, Pick Me Up, Abstinence, Talk, Teddy, Running and A Vision Of A Life.
Read that list again and notice what is missing. There is no wordplay in it. The titles are plain nouns and plain statements. Several of them are things one person says to another. A band aiming at a bigger room usually titles harder than this. Tekeyan does not, and the lyrics keep the same register: what happened, who it happened with, what it cost.
The running times are the other tell. The shortest track runs under three minutes and the longest just over five. Everything else sits between three and four and a half. Nothing sprawls, and nothing stops early to fit a format. Ten songs in that narrow a band of lengths is a discipline, and on a catalogue this long it reads as a decision.
What The Search Take From The Eighties
The band uses post-punk and new wave as material, not as costume. It files itself under darkwave, indie, post-punk and wave, which is broad, but the guitars carry the eighties inheritance clearly enough.
Writing in The Big Takeover, Dave Franklin drew the useful distinction. Plenty of groups look backwards and end up as a tribute to what they found. The Search take those older shapes and finish the thought in the present. He heard The Mission at their most restrained in You Just Want Somebody To Hold You. The comparison that follows the band around most often is The Smiths, and it holds for the guitar tone and the vocal placement more than for the mood.
Thoughts Words Action covered Pick Me Up on the day it came out. It is the track that comes closest to a single, and it is still not really one.
From the Curator Team: “Twenty years of releases and no result is normally where a catalogue starts repeating itself. This one does the opposite. The band got smaller, then got bigger again, and the writing kept narrowing until the songs stopped needing anything explained around them. That is a rare thing to hear on a record, and it is why this one is on the desk.”
Where To Hear Indulgence And Follow The Search
So this suits listeners who want guitar music that is unhurried and specific, and people who came up on eighties indie and want it continued rather than reproduced. Anyone who needs a record to announce itself in the first fifteen seconds should look elsewhere. A full sitting rewards you more than a shuffle does, and the band made that trade a long time ago.
The band calls itself an indie institution. After twenty-seven years and fifteen releases, that reads as a job description rather than a boast.
Indulgence is on Spotify, on Bandcamp and on SoundCloud.
Follow The Search across platforms: Spotify artist page, Facebook and Instagram. The discography and contact details sit on the band’s own site.
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