INTERVIEWS
Softest Hard Talks Moving to L.A. at 17, Touring With Skrillex, and More
After a relatively quiet 2020, LA-based DJ and hardstyle producer Softest Hard is back to touring. She’s no stranger to playing international festivals, having toured all over Asia and opening for Skrillex back in 2019. But her first festival performance in Canada was for the return of Vancouver’s beloved two-day music festival, FVDED In The Park, and EDM.com caught up with her after a heart-pounding set. Softest Hard. Jarett Lopez EDM.com: I didn’t realize you’ve played Vancouver before. What’s your vibe on Vancouver? Recommended Articles Softest Hard: I fucking love it here. I love Vancouver, everybody showing so much love, everybody so nice. Shoutout all the people at Fortune Sound for bringing me here first, but this has been such an experience having to pla...
How Biffy Clyro Learned to Embrace the Brightside With The Myth of the Happy Ever After
Is mankind hurtling to its ignominious end, like so many lemmings over a cliff? Simon Neil is sure he’s seen the telltale signs. And the gallows-humored Biffy Clyro anchor isn’t afraid of covering the extinction topic on his trio’s surprise, lockdown-sculpted new album, The Myth of the Happy Ever After. With no apology, it opens on the anti-Boris Johnson salvo “Dum Dum” (which lambastes the British prime minister for allegedly saying he’d rather have bodies piled up at his Downing Street door than impose another lockdown), then segues into a speed-bag-punchy “Witch’s Cup” (“I just hope when we go/That there’s something deeper”), the dissonant “Errors In the History of God” (“We’re trolls in this universe/happy just to torch shit”), and a funeral-parlor ethereal “Existed,” which finds the S...
Juelz On His “Paradise Lost” Concept Album, Working With RL Grime, and the Future of Trap Music
After almost two years without playing a show in his hometown fast-rising, Vancouver-based electronic music producer Juelz threw down at the city’s beloved FVDED in The Park music festival. EDM.com sat down with Juelz to chat about his meteoric rise and the future of trap music. EDM.com: So how are you feeling? You just rocked your second set at FVDED. Yeah, it was my second time playing FVDED, it’s been like three or four years since I played it last. Lots of shit has changed since. It feels good to be here, this is like my first hometown show in like a longtime. EDM.com: Speaking of that, you’ve been playing all over the place. When was your first show back from COVID-19 and how has it been on your various tour dates? First show back was at the Brownies & Lemonade fes...
Juelz On His “Paradise Lost” Concept Album, Working With RL Grime, and the Future of Trap Music
After almost two years without playing a show in his hometown fast-rising, Vancouver-based electronic music producer Juelz threw down at the city’s beloved FVDED in The Park music festival. EDM.com sat down with Juelz to chat about his meteoric rise and the future of trap music. EDM.com: So how are you feeling? You just rocked your second set at FVDED. Yeah, it was my second time playing FVDED, it’s been like three or four years since I played it last. Lots of shit has changed since. It feels good to be here, this is like my first hometown show in like a longtime. EDM.com: Speaking of that, you’ve been playing all over the place. When was your first show back from COVID-19 and how has it been on your various tour dates? First show back was at the Brownies & Lemonade fes...
Mastodon Are Inspired by Themselves on Hushed and Grim
Trying to be all things to everyone is a fruitless pursuit. It’s impossible on a logistical scale, much less an imaginative one, and no one ends up being satisfied. That being said, Mastodon’s latest album Hushed and Grim (out Friday through Reprise) is, in a way, a Mastodon record for all Mastodon fans. Whatever era you came on to the Atlanta metal quartet over the past two decades, they’ve got your number. “Teardrinker” and “More Than I Can Chew” recall their pivotal turn in Crack the Skye, when drummer Brann Dailor became a co-lead vocalist and ascended to heady prog-metal righteousness. For the heads from the beginning, “Pushing the Tides” and “Savage Lands” will take you back to when Remission was fresh and a roof and beer money was all you needed to be set. [embedded content][embedde...
SEVENTEEN Breaks Down Their New Album Attacca Track by Track: Exclusive
For our Track by Track feature, artists open up about the stories behind each song on their latest album. Today, SEVENTEEN take us track by track through their ninth mini-album, Attacca. Welcome to Attacca: aptly named after an antiquated word describing moving forward without pause, the EP is SEVENTEEN‘s ninth mini-album, the fourth during the pandemic era alone. The group has been going nonstop. As is par for the course for SEVENTEEN, the album features writing, composing, and arranging credits for all the group members, along with trusted collaborator Bumzu. It’s not all too common for K-pop artists to have such a heavy hand in the process, but the members of SEVENTEEN (along with many other artists under the HYBE umbrella) are enthusiastic exceptions. Advertisement Related Video This a...
Enjambre Looks to the Future With Their First English EP
Twelve years ago, Enjambre was on the brink of breaking up before taking off due to another pandemic, 2009’s swine flu pandemic. Fortunately, the band hung in there and have released seven albums that blended the romanticism of Mexican folk music with rock and roll that’s rooted in the U.S. Amidst the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the guys decided to translate the allure of their Spanish alternative rock into English on their EP Ambrosia. “Because of the pandemic, we finished the record [Próximos Prójimos] and we couldn’t go out and tour with it, so we were like, ‘Why don’t we just do that English thing?’” Luis Humberto Navejas tells SPIN over Zoom. With last year’s plans to tour the Próximos Prójimos album in Mexico and the U.S. sidelined, Luis Humberto started work on Ambrosia while i...
The Story of Rinzen, Electronic Music Journalist Turned Cinematic Techno World-Builder
The story of Rinzen begins with a peculiar art installation. Rinzen, whose real name is Michael Sundius, was visiting Barcelona’s Modern Art Museum when he stumbled upon Antoni Tàpies’ Rinzen, a striking piece that combines humble objects with pictorial and sculptural elements. “Rinzen means ‘a moment of sudden awakening’ in Japanese,” Sundius tells EDM.com. “I’m half Japanese so the name and meaning really spoke to me.” Manifesting the artwork’s intention to spark meditation and inner vision, Sundius adopted Rinzen as the moniker for his musical alias, aiming to create “cinematic, cerebral, melodic house and techno.” Rinzen’s prologue Music production wasn’t Sundius’ first foray into the world of electronic music though. He spent over five years at Danci...
Jim James: How Jamming, Dreams, Stranger Things Sparked New My Morning Jacket LP
“Balance and Surrender” is apparently the name of a yoga studio in Tamworth, England. It also could have easily been the title of My Morning Jacket’s ninth LP. First, the balance: It’s the only reason we even have this self-titled project, their first new album since 2015’s The Waterfall (and its temporarily shelved sequel from the same sessions, 2020’s The Waterfall II). After the gently twangy psych-rock band finished the grueling tour cycle behind that record, frontman/bandleader Jim James decided they needed to wind down for a bit — pausing, if not outright ending, the live/studio onslaught they’ve maintained since forming in 1998. “When the band was coming up, we were fortunate to get so many offers — go open for this band or that band, go do that show,” James tells SPI...
“People Can Reinvent Themselves”: VNCCII On How Dance Music Artists Can Embrace Futurism
Whether we like it or not, the advent of A.I. has turned the electronic music scene into a technological tinderbox in 2021. And before it really takes off in a scary and exciting direction, VNCCII is here to educate. The rising producer, rapper, and singer-songwriter is fresh off the release of her latest single “i-LIBERATE,” a velvet-smooth house track that furthers the through line of her unique story, which is centered on her eponymous “superheroine” avatar. VNCCII penned a sprawling op-ed on EDM.com in 2020 wherein she waxes poetic about the complicated relationship between AI and electronic music. “We need builders, dreamers, fixers, and doers,” she wrote at the time. “Whether we like it or not, AI is here and it’s here to ...
David Duchovny Finds Solid Ground With Gestureland
When actor, novelist and musician David Duchovny was 10 years old, he failed his Grace Church School choir audition in front of a bunch of his friends. Even worse, they’d assured him that nobody gets rejected. As Duchovny tells it, he misunderstood the instruction. When he was told to sing the note “after” the one the choirmaster played on the piano, Duchovny interpreted “after” to mean the next note in the scale and sang a higher note instead of matching what was played — a mistake he repeated several times in a row. Although he didn’t make it into the choir, his audition was impactful, nonetheless, as evidenced by the baffled looks on the faces of those who witnessed it. Even now, five decades later, Duchovny winces as he relays the anecdote. “I went home, and I was just mortified,” he s...
Dave Hause Puts Family — and an All-Star Band — First on Blood Harmony
Way back in the ancient days of October 2009, Dave Hause hit the road with Chuck Ragan (Hot Water Music), Jim Ward (At the Drive-In and Sparta), a slew of other revolving artists, and their acoustic guitars. It was the second annual Revival Tour — an alcohol-fueled romp featuring punk rockers playing acoustic, folksy versions of their songs (and sometimes others’ songs). “The Revival Tour was like the inside of Chuck Ragan’s brain,” Hause laughs. “It’s kind of chaotic, really beautiful, and really musical. There’s the sacred and the profane going on at all times. Everybody’s pretty drunk, but everybody’s also tapped into the lifeforce of music — and I think that might be why you can’t repeat it unless he’s there.” While everyone who was a part of the Revival Tour’s five-year run will likel...
