Django Django kondigt hun vijfde album, Off Planet, aan: een vierdelig album die in zijn geheel op 16 juni uitkomt. Voor nu alvast het eerste deel, Off Planet Part 1. Elk album-deel vormt zo een eigen ‘planeet’.

Het concept van deze plaat is door medeoprichter Dave Maclean bedacht, die een manier zocht om ‘verder te gaan’, daarbij zoekende naar nieuwe stemmen, ritmes en experimenten. 

Off Planet is het grootste en meest gevarieerde statement dat de band ooit heeft gemaakt. Samenwerkingen met Self Esteem, Jack Peñate, Stealing Sheep en Toya Delazy leveren geheel nieuwe creatieve invalshoeken. En al lijkt het soms niet op hun vorige releases, past Off Planet nog steeds helemaal bij Django Django.

Django Django today announce the release of Off Planet, an album in four parts, set for a full release on 16th June 2023 via Because Music. The fifth full-length studio album from the UK four-piece was conceptualised by Django Django co founder and powerhouse Dave Maclean, buzzing on ufology as “a way to go beyond”, to bring new voices, new rhythms, new experimentation into play, and effectively to deconstruct the band’s identity.

Released in four parts, each as a separate “planet”, Off Planet is the biggest, boldest, and most varied statement the band have made, with a cavalcade of mainstream and underground stars – Self Esteem, Jack Peñate, Stealing Sheep, Toya Delazy and many more, all of them either friends of the band or personally sought out by Dave – bringing entirely new creative angles into play. From bluesy pop and Middle Eastern cabaret goth to Afro acid and piano rave, to call it kaleidoscopic is putting it mildly. Despite at times not sounding like anything on their previous releases, Off Planet is very much still recognisably Django Django.

Off Planet Part 1, which features the first five tracks from the full length-album, is available to stream today.

“Complete Me” ft. Self Esteem, the first single to be shared from the album’s Part 1, is an explosion of 90’s inspired breakbeat. Packed with organs, pianos and synth strings, the track makes Rebecca Lucy Taylor’s hooks completely irresistible, as if echoing from some familiar memory. A long associate of the band, Self Esteem released her first EP on Dave’s Kick + Clap label, appearing on 2018’s Marble Skies and supporting the Djangos on tour.

Of the song, Maclean says, “The instrumental for Complete Me was made sometime in 2020 or 21 when the world was in lockdown and I was making music in my garden shed studio. It was a dance track that I didn’t really know what to do with. I sent it to Rebecca and she loved the vibe of it and really quickly came up with some vocal ideas that kind of stuck straight away and locked well with the track. The production was inspired by a lot of 90s breakbeat house and hip-house records that I’ve always been really into and loved Djing with over the years.”

Django Django began with, and remain driven by, the core of Dundee-born Dave and Vincent Neff from Derry, Northern Ireland, who met at Edinburgh school of art. Dave was, and is, an obsessive music collector who started DJing spacey jungle / drum’n’bass and then played and produced all kinds of electronic and experimental grooves from dancehall to krautrock and library music, but with a solid heart of raw American house and techno. Vinny meanwhile had grown up on rave and indie from his older sisters and was finding his own voice as a singer-songwriter. On moving to London they began making tracks together – Vinny’s songs and Dave’s arrangements – but it quickly blurred with both writing and structuring songs. Vinny’s natural facility with writing harmonies became a key part of the sound, and with the addition of keyboardist Tommy Grace and bassist Jimmy Dixon, they became the fully-fledged band that has carried on to today.

Off Planet, the band’s fifth album, began with Dave’s beats. Throughout lockdown and the surrounding period he had been super prolific, returning to his DJ roots and making standalone dance tracks – and at the start of the album process they went back to the original core pattern of Vinny writing over these beats (“fast and furious because he was making them faster than I could process them!”). Initially Dave was also making a lot of instrumental electronic tracks “very specifically to be not Django Django”, but as the writing process went on and tunes were passed to Tommy and Jimmy to write parts for, the idea of having a whole load of guests crystallised, and in fact Dave’s more ravey or hip-hop beats suddenly made sense when they imagined different voices on them and reaching out to friends or, in one case, just googling “Japanese rapper” (Yuuko). Just as the Django sound had evolved in the first instance from Dave’s immersion in club culture and Vinny’s songwriting, to become fully formed as they became a band, so the process was repeated on this album, albeit with grander ambition and a whole lot more participants.

From some 50 initial sketches on Dave’s original beats, the shape of the four “planets” began to become clear, and so did the songs, and during a week playing and recording together in the Scottish countryside at Dave’s family home in Polbain in the far northwest, it all became “Djangofied”. Off Planet remains fully functional as four separate “planets”, but the full rocket ride around them all is, incredibly, an even more coherent and enjoyable experience.

Flowing through all of this, too, is the emergent sense of cosmic wonder: as Dave puts it, “just about everything we love, whether that’s old psychedelia or Detroit techno, has that futuristic or outer space feel, and I think we can’t help putting that into what we do.” The term Off Planet comes from Dave’s obsession with ufology: it’s a term for hyper-advanced technologies kept secret from the populace. And perhaps that natural sense of the scale and potential of music and art as a technology itself is what has allowed them to very naturally align all their planets, to make sense and coherence from the ludicrous palette of colours they presented themselves with. Whatever it was, it worked, and whether you take Off Planet one part at a time or all at once, you’re immediately taken into the Djangos’ universe.