About

A Belgrade project built on melody and post-punk's colder edges

Bones in Butter is a versatile Serbian project built around the songwriting of Milutin Krašević, pulling together post-punk, indie, gothic, and electronic influences into songs that don't sit still in one genre.

Krašević was born in Lucerne, Switzerland, to Yugoslav immigrant parents. Piano lessons at seven didn't take — he quit after a year — but his older sister's record collection did: the Beatles, Simon & Garfunkel, Sparks. A few years later he attended his first real concert, Electric Light Orchestra's Out of the Blue tour in Zurich, and became a devoted fan on the spot. Punk and new wave caught him at the same time — the Stranglers, Wire, Magazine, the Velvet Underground — and between the two, a fairly peculiar taste in music took hold.

He picked up his father's old guitar around then, taught himself the first chords by ear, and started writing his own songs — never properly learning to read music, always playing and singing by ear instead. In his late teens he started experimenting with analog synthesizers, drum machines, and electric guitars and, joined by his childhood friend Isak Levi on vocals, formed the short-lived but prolific basement project THE UNITED ALTERNATIVES. Then reality kicked in for the first time, and he shifted his focus to studies in linguistics, because you never know what life may or may not offer…

But the next opportunity to take up music was waiting just around the corner. With his good friend, guitarist Angelo Viel, he started his first official band KASUAL, gigging locally around a dozen times in Lucerne and Zurich and releasing an EP — a self-recorded CD that sold, by his own count, exactly zero copies.

Obviously, making a living from niche music in Switzerland was never really on the table, so Krašević built a career instead as an English and German translator. But the creative flame never went out: "I never stopped composing, experimenting and recording, generating new ideas," he says. "Making music is just an inseparable part of me, something I need to do to stay alive." During that time, he frequently played and recorded with his friend Angelo of KASUAL and Davor Radišić, an experienced guitarist and sound engineer who familiarized Krašević with the latest recording, mixing, and mastering techniques.

After relocating with his wife and son to Belgrade, Krašević finally gave the passion room to breathe, founding Bones in Butter as a solo project in 2019. Enlisting remote session musicians in Serbia, Italy, and Brazil, he released the project's first EP, Love or Fear, in 2020. Soon after, with a dozen new songs written and no shortage of ideas left, he found a permanent lineup within Belgrade's alternative scene: Luna Škopelja, Todor Živković, Dejan Škopelja, Tom Fedja Franklin, and Srdjan Popov, who together shaped the sound the band has now grown into.

Krašević typically hears a song's shape in his head before touching an instrument — he builds it out on synthesizers, loops, and samples, adds lyrics and a vocal line, then hands the basic track to the rhythm section before the rest of the band layers in harmonies and guitar. Writing on subjects as varied as romance, the successes and failures of relationships, corruption, politics, transhumanism, and dystopia, the band released its eclectic debut album, Songs for a Sane Society, in 2023.

That creative momentum then led to a one-album deal with Rexius Records for Cosmopolis (2024), recorded with drumming duties shared across three players. Since then, Bones in Butter has returned to independent, unsigned status, self-releasing new material with a fluid lineup continuing to grow around Krašević's core songwriting.