Few artists have the deft ability to genre-hop without alienating vast swathes of their audience, but for Django Django, and the four-part Off Planet expanding their sound palette to channel the vibe of their formative dance music influences, as well as introduce an array of guest lead vocalists, has yielded a galaxy-sized bounty. Take the Self Esteem-fronted Complete Me, a pulsing slice of early ’90s rave-pop, led by one of the UK’s most in-demand vocalists. Then there’s the Jack Peñate-centred No Time, a joyous slice of euphoria, pre-soundtracking the baking summer we’re set to have this year. Cuts that sound a world away from Django Django’s earlier work, yet share an exploratory through-line with them.
Founded in 2009, the stuttering indie-rock oddity Default launched the four-piece as an unconventional addition to the UK’s indie canon. Subsequent records found the troupe investing in more ’80s synth-pop influences (Marble Skies) and sci-fi tinged psych-rock (Glowing in the Dark). Now Django’s core creative instigator – former house DJ and beat-crafter David Maclean – felt it was time to gearshift into a dimension not a million light-years from the dance music culture that he spent much of his youth living.
We asked David how the record found its shape: “The starting point for this album actually goes back a long way. A lot of this music and the beats and stuff were kind of on old hard drives. I’ve been making music since the 1990s and there’s bits and bobs from that era that were still floating around. During lockdown, I was forced to go back to old ideas. The timeline is a bit all over the place, but I guess it was lockdown that forced me to spend a long time thinking
