This week, Billboard is publishing a series of lists and articles celebrating the music of 20 years ago. Our 2006 Week continues here with one of the Teddybears remembering the group’s dominant year in pop culture, never hitting the Billboard Hot 100 but being as omnipresent as anyone through dozens of synchs of two of their ’06 singles.
You might remember Teddybears’ “Cobraystle” from 2006 alt rock radio, but it’s more likely you remember the song from the many other places it existed that year, and for years thereafter.
A synch juggernaut of late ’00s, the Swedish trio’s dancehall meets indietronica ass-shaker was used in commercials for everything from KFC to Volvo and in a long list of movies, television shows and videogames — including, but not limited to Date Night, Grey’s Anatomy and FIFA 06.
“It was a snowball effect,” Teddybears’ Joakim Åhlund tells Billboard. “Once it happened once, it started happening more. In some cases I’m sure it was our manager or someone at our record or publishing company pulling strings to get our songs that attention, but I haven’t really done anything except make the actual music.”
Whoever was pulling strings on behalf of Åhlund had been doing commendable work. The “Cobrastyle” phenomenon happened not long after “Jerk It Out” by Caesers, a band then known as Caesars Palace and also featuring Joakim Åhlund, was also widely synched in ads for Coca Cola, Nivea, and iPod Shuffle, with the silhouetted ad it soundtracked for the latter becoming synonymous with the famous ad campaign. Then, 25 years after it’s original release, Teddybears’ 2006 Iggy Pop collab “Punkrocker” was also used in last year’s Superman, a synch that gave it an 18,468% streaming surge last summer.
“When the Superman thing happened and we started hearing that song again, I was like ‘This is actually a really good song still,’” beams Åhlund.
Teddybears – brothers Joakim and Klas Åhlund and Patrik Arve – formed as a hardcore band in Stockholm in the early ‘90s, releasing its debut album in 1993. “Cobrastyle” first came out on the band’s fourth album, 2004’s Fresh, and in 2006 music from that album and 2000’s Rock ‘n’ Roll High School was amalgamated into the band’s first album released in the U.S., Soft Machine. The project contained two new tracks along with 12 older songs, including “Punkrocker” and “Cobrastyle.” The latter song gained further ubiquity when Robyn released a cover of it in 2007. “We’ve been good friends with Robyn for a long time,” says Åhlund. “[The cover] was kind of a natural thing for her to do, because it’s kind of a family thing.”
The Soft Machine release in conjunction with the Robyn cover and all the “Cobrastyle” synchs (along with general acclaim for the album) made Teddybears a presence in the U.S., where the group toured, played Coachella in 2007, appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live! and played “Cobrastyle” with Robyn on The Late Show with David Letterman.
“We were big in the very small country of Sweden,” says Åhlund. “We sang our music in English, and we were always thinking about an international audience. So it was good to reach out beyond the Swedish borders, which we did with Soft Machine. It was fun to be on Jimmy Kimmel’s show and have people in the U.S. and the whole world know about us.”
But by design, the world only ever knew Teddybears to a certain extent, given that its three members always performed and appeared in promotional materials wearing giant teddy bear heads. “We didn’t want to be famous,” says Åhlund. “And it was great, because even at peak Teddybears, I could still just ride the subway with my kids and nobody knew who I was.”
Naturally, the Iggy Pop association helped raise the band’s visibility, with the “Punkrocker” collab coming about after the band’s manager did more string-pulling.
“Sooner or later, we found someone who knew someone who knew him, and we just got in touch” says Åhlund. “We were like, shocked and of course overjoyed and surprised when he answered at all, and that he answered that he wanted to do it was crazy.”
Klas Åhlund and Arve recorded the song with Pop in Miami, and weeks later all three Teddybears filmed the music video with him in New York. “He was such a gentleman,” Joakim Åhlund recalls of the shoot “He had a bad boy rumor, perhaps not entirely undeserved at the time — and I didn’t expect him to be an animal or something, but he was a very dignified and at that time an already little bit elderly gentleman who was so eloquent, well-spoken, soft spoken and nice to everybody on the set.
While “Punkrocker” wasn’t written with Pop in mind, “it’s almost like it was,” says Åhlund. “It’s a song that’s perfect to be sung by him. He does it with this soulful voice with these echoes of experience in it. There’s not many in this world that could deliver it with such dignity and credibility.”
25 years after the song’s release, the song’s Superman synch was, as Åhlund tells it, a fluke that happened after the film’s music supervisor saw it on their Spotify dashboard. “He just liked it. It was a complete coincidence.”
Ten years after the last Teddybears album, 2016’s Rock On!, Åhlund and his bandmates see each other frequently in Stockholm, but have no current plans to record another album together. “I don’t feel like the world’s waiting for one, to be honest.” The bear masks are tucked away at a Stockholm storage facility, coming out for the occasional live gig.
Joakim Åhlund
Dan Kendall
Meanwhile, Åhlund is currently touring with his band Les Big Byrd, which is on the road supporting Brian Jonestown Massacre. Åhlund also plays free jazz and runs a small record label. The band’s members have also worked with myriad pop royalty, with Joakim Åhlund producing Charli xcx‘s 2013 “You (Ha Ha Ha)” (with Charli later interpolating “Cobrastyle” for her 2023 song “Speed Drive”) and Klas Åhlund producing music for stars including Britney Spears, Madonna, The Weeknd and Robyn, including much of her newly released album Sexistential. Åhlund reports that Arve “has like 15 different bands and projects.”
Looking back at the Teddybears’ era-defining mid-’00 run, Åhlund is satisfied. “We didn’t sound like anybody else or try to sound like anybody else, and to me it still sounds good today.
And while he jokes that the Superman synch helped him buy “a couple more Lamborghinis,” the reality is that despite all the success and the synchs, his lifestyle has always been pretty lowkey. “I live in an apartment in Stockholm city. I don’t even have a driver’s license. I ride a bicycle.”
