Django Django are one of those bands that everyone kind of knows. Shooting to success with their Mercury Prize-nominated debut record in 2012, the band has never really managed to recapture the spotlight they garnered with their debut. However, unlike most bands with early success, they are all the better for it, and Django Django has become a sonic vehicle that is always looking forward. Now on their fourth album, Glowing in the Dark, I caught up with Jimmy and Tommy from the band to chat about the record, how they’ve evolved, and how they keep their musical relationships fresh after all this time together.
Finished nearly a year ago, the record is one the band has been sat on for some time thanks to a certain pandemic. “Because over lockdown we started writing new stuff, it almost feels like, as we’ve been sat on it the past year, it’s an old album to us now,” said Jimmy.
“We were due to release originally in spring/summer, but we found it really difficult finishing it because everything was locking down, so it just kept on getting pushed back, and now we’re in February” added Tommy
Despite the delay, it seems like this album is a bit of a turning point for the band. The album is one in which, for the first time, every single member is getting involved in all aspects of writing and recording. Jimmy commented: “Usually when we start writing a record we’ll just start from fresh, there’s always old ideas flying about, but we’re always pretty keen to wipe the board clean and start again.
“This time around we’ve all been bringing ideas to the table, as previously it would just be Me, Vinny, and Tommy doing most of the writing”
“Dave being more present in terms of writing has been the main difference from Marble Skies” added Tommy.
The band also noted that the record was one of their most independent ventures yet, Tommy added: “We were really focussed on this record, but more in the sense that it’s just been us, in our own studio, and being almost bit control freaky, we were just doing everything ourselves and this time we really got the hang of it.
“For example, for something like recording our own drums, we would’ve normally gone out of the studio and gone elsewhere to do bits and bobs, but this has been 100% just us, in the studio, giving ourselves plenty of time to flesh things out and try things.”
There is no better evidence of this than on the title track ‘Glowing in the Dark’. “I think with this track, in particular, Dave had a much bigger hand in writing the basics and foundations,’ said Jimmy.
“Dave has his own label and it’s very dance oriented and he has a lot of records with beat samples and break samples and that was sampled from one of those records.”
The track features a sampled drum beat that feels cut straight out of a warehouse rave and marks a sound not oft explored by the band. On the song, Jimmy added: “The nice thing about that track for me is it’s not overthought, it’s a little, simple, dancy track, and rather than needing to be dissected and looked into, you can just appreciate it for just the sampled beat and synth line. I think it’s just a really fresh track and it’s quite an exciting one too.”
The other single the band had released when we spoke was ‘Spirals’, one you may have heard road tested if you saw the band live before the world went to shit. Tommy elaborated on the inspirations for the track: “We had the opening lyric about spirals which I’d sport of taken from this snippet from this Tom Wolfe piece he’d written about art theory, and then David put in the second lyric which sort of changed the focus of the track.
“It became this thing more suggestive of DNA and looking at stuff that unites us, the idea that we have our differences but we’re all the same, just to have a positive message basically.
“We were also working for ages on this progressive chord sequence that was suggestive of an upwards spiral, so it was a bit of a ping pong between the music and what we wanted the lyrics suggested, and trying to find the balance between the two.”
If you think these two tracks sound like their from two completely different bands, your observation wouldn’t go amiss. But, the band are complete advocates of such a process: “I think we’ve always been happy to treat the album as a bit of a mixtape, to keep the interest.”
“We’ve never really questioned whether tracks that don’t necessarily fit next to each other should be on an album together. We’ve always enjoyed trying to make an album work with tracks that don’t necessarily sit side by side, and it’s always been the case that if we like a track, we work it into the album,” added Jimmy.
For any band to reach their fourth album is an impressive achievement, and through some stifled laughs Jimmy and Tommy revealed their secrets: “we just argue a lot.”
“We’ve pretty much broken each other down, I guess as we all write lyrics together it can be pretty brutal, because you can come into the studio with the bones of a song that might have personal elements to it, and then within 15 minutes they’ve been ripped out and your before you know it you’re starting lyrics again. I guess as we all went to art school, you get your ideas ripped apart from the age of 17/18, so we’ve learned to not be precious over ideas.”
“I think another big thing is as a band we all get on, we talk, have a great laugh, and have a great crew who come on tour with us. Without having that kind of support and those people on the bus with us, it would be difficult.”
Glowing in the Dark comes out on the 12th of February.
