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Sep 10, 2020 Django Django By Christopher Roberts

Django Django are back with a new song, “Spirals,” shared via a kaleidoscopic video. It’s the band’s first new song in almost two years, since 2018’s Winter’s Beach EP and their third album, Marble Skies, also released in 2018 via Ribbon Music. “Spirals” is at first like an amusement park ride starting up, getting faster and faster, before the vocals come in and it gets into a more stable groove. Maxim Kelly directed the video, which features repeated images of frontman Vincent Neff spiraling as if in a DNA strand. It’s a welcome return from the endlessly creative British art rockers. Watch it below.

Kelly had this to say about the video in a press release: “The approach behind ‘Spirals’ by Django Django was to translate the psychedelic trip through The Victorian technique of the phénakisticope. The visual illusion generated by spinning the disks at the correct speed coupled with the shutter of a camera is both confusing and hypnotic. I was drawn to how the animations flow in and out, drifting and duping the mind and then back again. This felt a lot like the psychedelic experience tome. The challenge was to fuse the old with the modern. The analogue and the digital. Updating and modernizing the technique.”

A press release says “Spirals” is “an utterly compelling glimpse at what’s to come” and that it was written for an upcoming live set, but there’s no mention of a new album. The press release further describes the song: “Beginning with elegant circling synths that grow into a never-more-relevant anthem to hope, it uses the image of DNA to muse on how the connections we have as humans are stronger than the divisions.”

Django Django also features producer/drummer David Maclean, bassist Jimmy Dixon, and synthesizer operator Tommy Grace.

Marble Skies was the follow-up to the band’s 2015 sophomore album, Born Under Saturn, and their 2012-released Mercury Prize-nominated self-titled debut.

Read our 2018 interview with Django Django on Marble Skies.

Also read our 2012 interview with Django Django and our 2015 interview with the band.

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