NEMAS - Hell Yeah!

The story of NEMAS
The story of the band really started when we got our complete lineup, before that the band was more of hobby to all of us. It was also at this time that we came up with our name, NEMAS. Depending on who you ask you will get five different versions of how we came up with it. The short one is that it´s from a saying in sweden, "Nemas problemas", which means "no problem". Maybe that´s obvious but whatever.
Although the band got more serious at that time we had already recorded our first demo earlier that year without Jontee so the focus now was to get some gigs. After a few months we finally booked our first show, at a shady place called Nellie. We all were nervous as hell and we probably didn´t put on one hell of a show but we got the taste for it and we knew that we wanted to evolve and had the potential to do it.

Our second gig, the first of many at "Club Centurion" went a lot better. To begin with we broke the current attendence record for the club. About 180 people strong showed up to rock out with us. This made us even more nervous, so we got to drinking. That made us calm down and we played our asses of, jumping into the crowd and having the time of our lives. Then we suffered our first real setback, Joel was going away to Thailand for three months just as the bells for the new year rang. The timing was the worst ever as we had just joined a music competition (first and last time mark our words) and also had one of our best shows up to this day a few nights before. Vic stepped up to the challenge as replacement singer and we actually got through the first round of the competition.

It wasn´t easy though, these were pretty bad times with a lot of arguing amongst the remaining members of the band. Things escaleted the day before the day of the competition and it got to the point were Jontee threw his base in the ground after some in his opinion bad focus from certain other members. Things got better for a few weeks after we made it through but the bad air came back and we figured we had to do something about it. So NEMAS went away for a weekend to record our second demo, without Joel. We recorded it in a small studio in Uddevalla and it came out a lot better then the previous demo.

So when Joel finally came back we had a lot better ground to stand on looking for gigs. The first focus though was the second round of the previous mentioned competition. Joel came back just a week before it so no one really thought we would make it through, but we did, and it felt great. So we were in the state finals, as the only punk band. Things stopped there and the state victory went to our good friends in the metal band Marionette. We had greater things coming though. In late may we got booked to the biggest punk festival in scandinavia, Augustibuller. So we were to share the stage with great bands like The Briggs, The Casualties and The Toydolls. To say that we were psyched was, as you can emagine, the understatement of the year.

We had a few other shows during the summer warming up towards the festival and when we were finally there we were like kids in a candy store. We were the only band that played that stayed for the entire festival (?) and we loved every minute of it. We didn´t play our best show ever but everyone that saw us thought it was great and we made a lot of new friends that week in the outskirts of Örebro. Later that summer we also played shows in a few other cities such as Stockholm and Jokkmokk. Jokkmokk was pretty weird, we recommend you to check out our video of that experience to understand.

During the fall we also got the song "Orignal punk" featured in a nation wide TV-commercial that aired on several channels for a few weeks. So things were looking up NEMAS. The final show summary for 2007 landed at 20 which is pretty decent for a brand new band like NEMAS.

So 2007 was a great year for us, but 2008 is gonna be even more awesome. We have recorded our best material by far this febuary ad we aim to play a lot more gigs in a lot more cities then 2007. Hopefylly we´ll see you on the way.

"Give us gigs, big or small. Doesn´t matter we play em all"

Thanks for your time
NEMAS