Django Django: On their ambitious third album

With their pipe dreams about building a bridge between Northern Ireland and Scotland, the DUP weren’t the only ones starting the New Year thinking about exciting Celtic powerhouses. But while some projects seem so ambitious that they’re ultimately doomed to failure, the same can never be said about anything Django Django have conceived.

Following the unprecedented success of their self-titled debut album, the Scottish/English/Northern Irish four-piece “put everything into the pot” on 2015’s Born Under Saturn, resulting in an LP that felt like a serious of technically brilliant set-pieces, but without an LP’s requisite cohesion.

All the band – bar one – have had mini Djangos the years following their groundbreaking debut, and a spate of world-touring meant that it wasn’t easy to envision when a third album would be released. But as Vincent Neff tells Hot Press – speaking from a warehouse studio in Tottenham – things got moving pretty quickly when it came to groundwork for Marble Skies.

“When we finished touring Born Under Saturn, Tom, Jim and I really didn’t know what to do with ourselves,” says Vincent. “Dave went off and did a bit of production work up in Scotland, because he was knackered after touring, but we were all itching to get into something new. So we went into the studio with Anna Prior from Metronomy, who we were on tour with when they were promoting English Rivera. She lives really close by, so we got into a studio nearby and did explorative things for a new album. Any ideas that anybody had on their phones or anything, we aired them out, and she just helped us get a vibe going. Then we were sending tracks up to Dave and he was helping out. Cutting stuff up, sending his own ideas back down.”

Marble Skies sees the band channelling a huge mix of genres into a winning psych-pop amalgam. Title track and album-opener ‘Marble Skies’ is a harpsichord-fuelled pop number, more upbeat than almost anything they’ve ever done, while ‘Surface To Air’ – a dancehall production that wouldn’t be out of place on a Mark Ronson album – sees Vinny handing over vocal duties to Slow Club frontwoman Rebecca Taylor. According to Vinny, this was an album was about “breaking the rules” in all the right ways.

“I think even if we had the thought in our head of stick to just one thing, we’d be trying to break the rules straight away,” Vinny laughs. “I mean if we tried to pigeonhole things with one style, we’d be pushing the boundaries, probably without evening knowing it. And in some ways that makes for a big headache for us, trying to thread the needle through everything and make it sound coherent.

“We’re from a culture of mixtapes. When we were all kids, we’d be fascinated by that mad little journey of taking a low-tempo keyboard section and turning it into this big electro thing. We were also massive Beatles fans, so we’d be listening to all the vocal changes going on when George sings, then Paul sings, then Paul and John together. Every track was like a new world. That’s something that we try to emulate – everything we do, it has to be new and exciting for us.”

The album title stems from a dramatic skyscape the band witnessed just before a storm broke out at Lollapalooza in Chicago. Certainly, the record delights in its own dreamy, spaced-out musings. But does that mean it’s removed from contemporary social concerns?

“The current political climate, you sometimes feel like you just want to be taken off this planet,” Vinny explains. “You know, when all this shit’s going down. I don’t think we ever wanna ram politics down anyone’s throats, and I think when people are explicit with stuff, it feels slightly like it’s a lecture. So we’ve always avoided that. You know, I grew up in Derry whenever The Undertones were the band of the day. And everybody was very conscious that all those tracks were written at a time in Derry when stuff was mental, but they fought against playing into the hands of it all. They tried to create a joyous kind of scene.”

It might not be the Bogside in the 1970s, but there’s something important in that idea for Vinny. Amidst the complexity of the modern world, Django Django have arrived at their most straightforwardly joyous album yet.
Marble Skies is out now on Ribbon Music.
Django Django play the Tivoli Theatre, Dublin, on March 2.