Me & Melancholy Hold the Unstable Fifth on FEM

Peter Ehrling works alone in Stockholm, and he has been doing so in public since 2022, when Me & Melancholy stepped out of an earlier project called Gränsen. He writes the songs, records them, mixes them, masters them. Hardware synths sit next to guitars and in-the-box production, and the records have kept a consistent temperature even as the catalog has grown fast. Under the cover of darkness in 2023, Illusio Veri and a covers set in 2024, Open Your Eyes in 2025. The lineage is easy to hear. New Order’s night drive. Depeche Mode’s low register. A restlessness borrowed from indie records that never fully trusted the chorus. What matters more than the references is the control. Ehrling builds small rooms and then lets a voice occupy them without decoration.

FEM arrived on 1 September 2026 through LoudArc. Eleven tracks, about thirty-five minutes. The title is the Swedish word for five. Ehrling has said he preferred FEM to Five or 5 because it felt more personal, more like a mark than a slogan. The album is dedicated to his father, who died in 2026. A spring release was planned. The calendar slipped. During the summer he wrote Lost in you, and a colder industrial current entered a record that had been heading somewhere brighter. That delay is part of the shape. Life refused a single mood. The album follows it.

Here is the thought that will not leave the stereo. In Western harmony the perfect fifth is the interval that sounds most settled after the octave. Choirs lock to it. Guitars are tuned around it. A power chord lives there, two notes with no third, no confession of major or minor, just a blunt agreement. Piano tuners spend their working lives inside that interval. Stretch it a few cents and the whole instrument starts to lie. FEM is named after five and then spends thirty-five minutes refusing the rest that number is supposed to promise. The fifth will not sit. That is the point of the record.

Dance with me opens as if the agreement might hold. Bright synths, a restless beat, three minutes aimed at a floor that still believes in surrender. You moved like a ghost across the street. Already inside my head. Then the other voice arrives with no time, talk fast, I am drifting away. The chorus wants abandonment. Never let go. Let it all flow. Under the immediacy there is already a clock. The song knows the night will not last. It still offers the night anyway.

Lost in you cuts the lights. Two minutes thirty-six. Bass and mechanical drums. Emptiness when you lie and then cry. Resignation as a spoken temperature. The chorus lists the places a person can vanish. Life, you, land, sea. What is false and what is true. No release in the hook. Only the loop of being unable to tell. This is the song Ehrling wrote after the planned release date collapsed, and you can hear the room change around it. The album’s contrast is not a playlist trick. It is a change of weather inside one working year.

Broken Souls finds a steadier pulse and a wider melody. Listening to the silence. Waiting for it to speak. Every scar still knows my name. The chorus reaches for a light the song admits it will not enter, a place where broken souls might still glow. Not everything is meant to heal. Some things stay real because they hurt. All of You tightens the frame again. Tears described as wet, warm, salty. Anger as a short circuit. I kept my word and you gave all of you. When I broke your heart I took everything from you. The vocal stays close to speech. The arrangement leaves space so the admission has nowhere to hide.

Reputation is the record’s most built-up charge. A harder beat, a whispered inventory. Aggressiveness. Vulnerability. Too slow. Incompatible. Personality traits designed to be strong. Calculated love. Programmed joy. A spotless past. A reputation to die for. Cracks show. The mask peels. Lies drunk like holy wine. The song enjoys the collapse a little, which is honest. Squids drops into a shorter, stranger pocket. Shadows that know your name. Crawling under my own skin. Too many eyes, too many names, too much noise. The voice offers a nickname, Squidso, as if a label from someone else might finally be cheaper than resistance. Call me that if it helps you. I do not care anymore. The shrug is the wound.

The One I Am is the cleanest refusal on the album. I tried to be such a good boy. I kept the silence. I even forgot who I am. Why can’t you see. Just let me be the one I am. The arrangement is spare enough that the demand has weight. All Love Is Gone widens the synths and slows the blood. Sun on a face. Tears. Flowers that do not purchase forgiveness. Promises that were a lie. Then the paradox that gives the track its afterlife. All love is gone. Until the end of days I will love you always. The relationship is finished. The feeling is not. Ehrling lets both sentences stand. He does not tidy them.

Just Like the Sun warms the air without pretending the weather has changed for good. When I am weak then you are the strong one. When I go down then you go up like the sun. Devotion as a counterweight. No Permission snaps back to march time. Raised on broken screens. Silent truths. Empty dreams. No permission needed to feel, to speak, to breathe, to live. The refrain works like a stamp. Repeat until the body believes it. Ghosts in the Mirror closes at nearly five minutes, the longest piece here, and it turns the listener toward the glass. I was never afraid to die. I was always afraid to live. The other person is gone. What remains are regrets that will not resolve into a story, a last sentence that echoes day and night, and figures in the reflection that whisper, laugh, and call a name. The album ends there. No sermon. No cleaned room.

Ehrling has said he tried to follow the songs rather than decide what an electronic album is supposed to sound like. You hear that decision in the pacing. Bright, then cold. Tender, then accusatory. A dance invitation sitting three tracks away from a list of programmed joys. The production stays close to the bone. Synths draw hard lines. Beats arrive with little ornament. Vocals carry the heat, sometimes almost spoken, sometimes lifted into a chorus that still sounds like a person in a small room. Influence is present without costume. The New Order comparison that follows Dance with me is fair for a minute. Then the record walks somewhere less public.

What gives FEM weight is the precision of that walk. The fifth album of a one-person Stockholm project could have been a victory lap in familiar synthpop. Instead it keeps the old tools and lets private weather into the mix. Grief is not explained. It changes the temperature of a beat. Identity is not a branding exercise. It is the argument of The One I Am and the shrug of Squids and the inventory of Reputation. Love leaves and stays at the same time. The perfect fifth promised rest. This record keeps the interval slightly out of tune on purpose. You feel the lie in the instrument, and you keep listening because the lie is the most human thing in the room.

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