C
“November Rain.” D: The “Jealous” video was the “November Rain” thing, with the marriage. But then it’s like “November Rain” meets A$AP Ferg. It’s a mishmash of influences. At the border at the airport the other day, the guy goes “Oh, so are you guys in a band?” And we’re like “Yeah,” and he’s like “What do you guys do?” What did he say, hard rock? P: Heavy metal. D: He thought we were a heavy metal band based on what we looked like. Which is perfect! Because our whole thing is mixing together these different aesthetics. You have this sound that’s very identifiable as Chromeo, but the whole aesthetic universe, that’s how we’re a current, Tumblr-era band.
H
R
O
M
E
O
on the head it looks new and sounds new. When you choose artists to collaborate with, are you thinking about whether they’ll bring something new to your sound? D: Absolutely. And we also think about how people would react. Part of being a musician in this era is being in tune with what expectations are. We knew that when Chromeo came out with a song with Toro Y Moi, that blogs would eat it up! Because we read those same blogs – we know what they like. It’s a cool dialogue we have with them. We give them something, they write about it, you see what they
write, and that helps us plot our next move. The bloggers and journalists, all these interlocutors we have, they’re part of our creative process too. We look at alright, who’s going to bring something cool to the Chromeo formula? And also “Yo, are people gonna trip when they see this?” Having a full-on brand is more important than ever now. Before, people weren’t constantly paying attention, but now you have to perform on all channels. D: Well, a lot of our idols did it like that. Like Iron Maiden: they had a great brand. Depeche Mode had a terrific brand. When we were young,
Image has a huge role in recontextualizing sounds from the past. It has to make them look cool again. D: Even more than cool, it has to seem different. I think the reason why “Needy Girl” launched our career is because nothing else sounded like that when it came out. Yeah, it had a big eighties influence, but it wouldn’t have sounded new in the eighties, it sounded new in 2004. Timing is just being sensitive to the era where you live. That’s why we ingest everything from the present. And overall, I think making music is more fascinating now. Because it’s more democratic. You used to have to go into these huge studios, and you’d have a producer... P: You used to need to own instruments. Now all you need is a computer. D: We choose to do it in a kind of old-school way. We still own a ton of instruments and collect them. But that’s just because we find romance in that. We’ll never say we love the analog sound because it’s better. We like the analog sound because it works well for Chromeo. P: It gives us a way to keep that influence we have and mix it with what people want to hear today. So we’ll go in and put some computer stuff and some plug-ins, but we will keep the essence. D: We work like fashion designers. We go through the archives. We’re very clear about what archives we consulted, but when we hit the nail no.
XL
issue
NOVEMBER - DECEMBER
p.
037