If you were to imagine the recent evolution of music in Europe as a series of scenes from a Where’s Wally?-style puzzle book, one bespectacled, lanky figure would pop up on almost every page. There he is in mid-90s London, handing out flyers for his first band Peachfuzz. Here he is in NME at the dawn of the new millennium, fronting folk duo Kings of Convenience and spearheading the new acoustic movement. There he is strumming his guitar in the vanguard of Norway’s “Bergen wave”. Then he’s off spinning records in Berlin nightclubs during the city’s “poor but sexy” post-millennial years. By the 2010s, he’s driving a renaissance of Italian chamber pop as part of La Comitiva, his bandmates hailing from the southern tip of Sicily.

It’s hard to think of a figure more musically cosmopolitan than Erlend Otre Øye, connecting the dots across a continent where national scenes rarely overlap – and making magic happen. No wonder his debut solo album, with 10 tracks recorded in 10 different cities, was called Unrest. Of all his reincarnations, though, the one that has best endured (if you go by Spotify) is his four-piece, The Whitest Boy Alive. And this spring and summer, they’re reuniting for a tour of Mexico and Europe to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Dreams, their debut album.

After the success of Quiet Is the New Loud , the first album from Kings of Convenience, his congenial bandmate Eirik Glambek Bøe suffered a breakdown and opted to stay in Bergen to study psychology. “Eirik was never into music as a way of living,” says Øye, via video call from a beach cabin on Mexico’s Pacific coast, his sun-kissed hair and peach shorts announcing how far he has come from rainy Norway. “He was just into it as a nice thing to be doing. I was into making it a career.”

And so, at the start of the millennium, Øye moved to Berlin. Despite its cool reputation, the German capital “was a bit of a wasteland for actual played music. So many people who went there became DJs, stroked their chins and talked interestingly about the musical references they made. They didn’t strive to really convince, to really make.”

He befriended Marcin Öz, a Polish DJ at the since dissolved clubbing institution WMF. Even though they didn’t share the same taste in electronic music – Öz played minimal techno, Øye beats with breaks – they were both driven. “We were two ambitious people who really had a lot of petrol to go places.” At a rehearsal space on the Karl-Marx-Allee boulevard, they met keyboard player Daniel Nentwig and drummer Sebastian Maschat. “We realised Maschat was a really good drummer: he could play house music beats on an actual drum set, which in 2004 very few bands could do, other than perhaps the Rapture and LCD Soundsystem.”

Dreams still sounds gorgeous: unashamedly melancholy indie pop, drilled to the buildup-and-release patterns of deep house, its whispered tales of friendships made and loves lost propped up by a rhythm section that is both as stripped-back as a garage band and as tight as a gang of session musicians. Think Joy Division fronted by Art Garfunkel. In terms of the mood, rather than the music, it was the 21st century’s first answer to Everything But the Girl: music that a generation could dance to but also be sad to.

Yet their reception in the Anglosphere was lukewarm. The Guardian was reminded of “Jamiroquai’s most soulless moments”. Pitchfork called Dreams “toothless”, as if “Kraftwerk had produced Fleetwood Mac”. Did he mind? “If you look at it now,” he shrugs, “all the bands the critics did like haven’t really made it that far. So they were a bit wrong.”

Perhaps the problem was in the name. The Whitest Boy Alive was the result of a self-effacing quip Øye made in an interview with a German music magazine to describe his own musical tastes. Öz thought it was funny. “It stopped us from having any success in the US in the beginning,” says Øye, “because in the US, people are afraid of anything that could be racially connected. Which is ironic, because in many ways the music is not that white at all.”

This would be a familiar tale: Kings of Convenience’s most obvious musical inspiration wasn’t folk but Brazilian bossa nova. The Whitest Boy Alive’s best-known track was 1517, almost definitely the only love song about the Reformation ever to have featured on a Fifa video game. It evolves around a (not-very-white) tresillo rhythm that is typical of reggaeton.

Their tour will take in Potsdam, Paris and Copenhagen. But the one country where the band has had the greatest impact is not in Europe. “It’s Mexico, for sure,” Øye says. “We played a festival in 2021 – and there were 8,000 people who knew every word to every song. It was an incredible party.”

The Whitest Boy Alive broke up in 2014, with a statement that hinted at internal strife and cited their song Golden Cage (“You knew what you wanted and you fought so hard / Just to find yourself sitting in a golden cage”). Øye reflects: “We were trying to make a new album, but with too much democracy. You could say that was the straitjacket, the golden cage.”

The main reason the band stopped is less dramatic, although tragically ironic given Øye’s love of hushed vocals and clean, undistorted guitar sounds. He has tinnitus and hyperacusis, the latter causing an unusually low tolerance for environmental noise that makes rehearsal studios and indoor gigs almost unbearable.

“It’s a constant peep,” he says stoically. “You get used to it after a while. It’s not so troublesome any more, but if I continue being in loud situations, it starts to go higher.” Half-jokingly, he blames a gig he attended by the British alternative rock band Swervedriver in Bergen in 1997.

In the early 2010s, Øye bought a house in Syracuse, Sicily, and moved there with his mother, who died in 2016. He has spent six months a year there since, which seems a remarkably long period in Øye time. Has he finally discovered stillness? “Where I live in Syracuse, it’s green all year round. That’s fantastic. But having grown up in Norway, almost any country will be an improvement. People think Norway’s full of snow. To me, Norway is just trees with no leaves. Autumn is two weeks and the rest is just barren, lifeless, grey. It’s so very grim.”

I’m sceptical about the anti-patriotism. Surely his homeland is the biggest cultural superpower Europe has right now, with Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value and its star Renate Reinsve sweeping up film awards, Karl Ove Knausgård leading contemporary fiction and Erling Haaland breaking record after record in the Premier League? Norway is even going to the World Cup.

Øye can’t hide his excitement when I mention the football. “It’s interesting to talk about Haaland because he is not very Norwegian. He’s not your typical modest Norwegian prime minister character. He’s more of a star that wants to be treated like a star.” He cites the Law of Jante, a code of conduct first articulated in a 1930s novel that still has some effect on Scandinavian etiquette: don’t think you are anything special.

“I’m very proud of Norwegian egalitarianism,” he says. “But I feel that, culturally, we’ve taken a huge step forward by allowing Haaland to be the star and just playing around him. Finally we have a good team, because we’re allowing people to be a bit different.” Is there a bit of Haaland in Europe’s indie-music Wally, forever wandering around the continent because he too wants to find a team happy to play around him?

Øye rejects the comparison, but I wonder if that’s just more Jante. Because when I ask him why he got his old band back together, he says: “The main reason is no one else can play our music. I mean, it’s not as if other bands have come along and done it much better than us. No, it’s still only The Whitest Boy Alive who can do The Whitest Boy Alive.”

• The Whitest Boy Alive play Waschhaus Potsdam on 25 August; Vega Copenhagen on 27 August and Cabaret Sauvage in Paris on 31 August.