Biography
Jens Unmack is a songwriter and vocalist and has been the driving force of the Danish band Love Shop for over 35 years.
Since its formation in 1986, Love Shop has changed crew several times. Jens Unmack originally founded the band together with guitarist Hilmer Hassig, then Mikael Dehn and Henrik Hall joined. Dehn left the group in 1995, Hassig in 2004. After a break in the second half of the 2000s, Hall and Unmack Love Shop resumed in 2010, but already the following year Hall died of cancer. Run by Unmack and with regular creative partners in Mikkel Damgaard, drummer Thomas Duus, guitarist Mika Vandborg and bassist Nis Tyrrestrup, Love Shop has since played its way out of the shadows.
For more than a decade, Love Shop has maintained a strict discipline with a new studio album approximately every two years, and in this way they have both kept their minds fresh and created a vibrant current catalogue. The latest album BLUES EUROPA is a continuation of the production of recent years, but also stands out by drawing to a much greater extent on Unmack's own lived life - and by being a defined work that seeks a direct conversation with its time.
"It's probably a more openly reflective record from my side. A collection of songs about what was, what it has all become, and what is to come. Did I get enough of it all? And where did the calm that I grew up with go? The course of life and the speed of everything gets entangled in the music, and there is something beautifully chaotic about how the world grinds and pumps. So it is also an album about modern life, how life in the midst of this constant feeling of turbulence has a lot of choices and possibilities," says Jens Unmack.
At the same time, BLUES EUROPA sends a postcard back in time. Until the band's debut, until the time when the Wall had just fallen and everything seemed open. On the album 1990, the song 'I den ny by' revolved around the Copenhagen that a younger version of Jens Unmack entered. During the shutdown, the present-day version of Jens Unmack began to take a nearly two-hour long walk with his dog in today's Copenhagen and really saw the city's sweeping change.
“I discovered that it was a new city again. A completely different city to the one I moved to in 1982. Back then, my whole district of Islands Brygge smelled of the soya cake factory, people were tired, large iron cranes covered the harbor front, and you would get scratched if you tried to swim in the harbor. I filtered my own story into the city's history. What kind of person was it that was sent away then? What happened along the way? What does tomorrow hold? Where do I belong in this? It is fragments from the inner dialogue and fragments from the surrounding city that have landed on the new album.”