Genre-confounding and defying, Little Dragon has been wielding soul, dream pop and electronica alongside heftier sounds like trip hop, in a three-record run that has seen these sounds balance out into a dynamic force identifiable only as the band’s imprint. On its fourth record Nabuma Rubberband, Little Dragon’s recombinative mores have further enriched the zeitgeist with yet another singular testament to why changing it up can be fantastic. Ahead of the band’s set at Laneway Festival 2015, we got drummer Erik Bodin to shed light on these Little Dragon highlights…
ON NABUMA RUBBERBAND
The whole album started with basically with us moving out of our old studio and moving into a new one. We reshaped everything and made more space for everybody to work on their ideas. We also had a lot of time off because we had been travelling so much. At that time, we needed a break and really got deep into making music. We took our own time, just doing sketches, and then we spent a lot of time together, finishing up and really making it rich and adding strings and trying things that we never did before.
“KLAPP KLAPP”
I think it also bears the influence of John Coltrane and some Moroccan music, especially where the bassline just goes and goes and you can do anything on top of it, even just clap. From the start, it was just the clap and the bassline. It was minimal but very easy to get ideas for what goes on top.
“PARIS”
“Paris” is very original in the way it became a song. It actually started in Berlin where Fred [bassist] was based. We kept sending ideas for “Paris” back and forth from Gothenburg to Berlin. It was nice to do that, you know? You do something and then you send it over and you forget about it. When it comes back and it’s something you don’t recognise, you have this “What’s this? Oh yeah, wait a minute” feeling. After we put vocals on it, we decided to go for a kind of a kind of poppy, uplifting vibe, with sad lyrics. It’s always nice to make things clash like that.
ON THAT BIG BOI COLLABORATION
It was kind of a surprise, actually. A girl doing press for us in the UK said that “Dre” was a big fan of us. We thought she meant Dr. Dre but it was actually Andre 3000! Eventually, they started reaching out to us and when we happened to be in Atlanta on tour and had some days off, we actually went to Outkast’s Stankonia Studios. It was great. I actually found out that it was Bobby Brown’s old studio. We really learnt a lot from that experience, and we realised that they also just play around and have fun. Some ideas were bad, some were great and we just kept on going and enjoyed it. It really gave us confidence to keep on having the same approach we have.
NEXT STEPS
From Nabuma though, we learnt when to take our time and when to just go for it. I think we also learnt to be more accepting since this was quite a mellow and slow album. At first we thought, “Oh no, we wanted to make dance music”. But then we realised that this is what we did; this is us. So it’s all good. The next step now is to maybe do a dance EP! We have that space now where we can react to what we did last time and do something different. We love to be different.
Catch Little Dragon at Laneway Festival Singapore 2015, which happens on 24 January 2015. For ticketing information, proceed to singapore.lanewayfestival.com.
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