Beautiful and Slightly Unbearable

JJ—Joakim Benon and Elin Kastlander from Gothenburg—made some of the most affecting and quietly difficult music of that period. Made in Sweden sits in their characteristic haze: dream-pop filtered through Swedish melancholy, something almost narcotic in the production, a lightness that somehow lands like a weight. Their music always seemed to arrive from very far away, even when the lyrics were about something immediate. The distance was the point. That’s what Sweden apparently does to a pop song, and I’m still not entirely recovered from it.