Though separated by nearly 3,000 kilometers (Jeff Louis is based in Austin and Leanne Macomber in Philadelphia), their creative connection remains undeniable. Across that distance, the pair maintain their gauzy synth textures, drum machine pulse, and intimate emotional tone.

The duo formed in 2007 when Macomber (also of Young Ejecta and Wet Eggs) was seeking a new direction for her lyrics and found a collaborator in Louis, whose arrangements help define their sound.

After a 14-year hiatus, Fight Bite returned with their new release, Party!, on 21 April 2026. During that time, Macomber relocated and worked with her other projects, but the duo continued exchanging music remotely.

“We’re not so much a band about evolution as we are about continuing to see how we connect and where we meet. Like a very innate childhood connection, it just sort of lives forever and grows.” – Leanne Macomber

Macomber has described the break as necessary, saying, “we really wanted to distill the best of both of our efforts.” The album was built through email exchanges. Sometimes Louis would send musical sketches for Macomber to add lyrics to, and other times she sent full demos for him to reshape. She calls it a “double blind process,” resulting in a record that balances dreamlike nostalgia with fresh, subtle experimentation.

The stand out track on the album is “Party (I Have Never),” which begins with a pulsing beat and the brilliant, haunting line “I have never been naked in front of a man before.” Another beautiful track is “Killer Whale,” which sounds like an undiscovered Julee Cruise track and features a spoken word section that echoes back to 60s girl groups like The Shangri-Las.

On Party!,the influence of Mazzy Star and This Mortal Coil are undeniable, but their influences are much broader. Macomber draws inspiration from cinema, which she works in, saying, “I’m always inspired by how the mind collages experiences and film is sort of the pinnacle expression of that.”

Louis highlights David Lynch’s film soundtracks as a key influence and adds that, despite Austin’s vibrant music scene, Macomber’s songwriting remains his biggest inspiration. Looking ahead, Macomber hopes to tour in the autumn, while Louis notes they have enough material for two albums.

That sense of coziness tinged with disquiet runs throughout Goodbyehouse. “We’ve both gone through changes and break-ups in different relationships and contexts the past year,” they explain. “Goodbyes have been said to important people and places—lovers, friends, childhood homes, regular hangout spots. I think a kind of separation anxiety and mourning mixed with joy and excitement for the ‘new’ has inspired the album a lot. It took me a while to realize how much the album title actually encapsulates this feeling. Moving away from ‘home’.”

Snuggle first appeared in late 2023 with the EP Calendula, a fragile, heartfelt collection shaped by grief and renewal. Its title draws on overlapping personal symbols: “The Danish word for calendula is morgenfrue, which translates to ‘morning-misses,’” Strange explains. “It was my dad’s favorite flower, and Søren [Holm, the late frontman of Liss] once gave me a drawing he made of a calendula.” That quiet layering of memory about family, friendship, and absence lent the record a weight of remembrance, full of dreamy textures and raw, unguarded emotion. If Calendula was about holding on, Goodbyehouse embraces departures and transitions, post-grief and forward-facing. It doesn’t erase sadness, but it carries it into the future, toward new homes, new goodbyes, and whatever comes next.

Snuggle by Johanna Hvidtved

Immediate highlights like “Sun Tan” and “Woman Lake” showcase snuggle’s gift for bittersweet earworms. The opener, “Sun Tan,” is all luminous riffs and vaporized beats, the kind of song that feels effervescent until you notice the shadows creeping along the edges. “Woman Lake,” meanwhile, is their most direct and folky moment to date: acoustic strums and bowed strings unfurling into a chorus that feels like cannonballing into cloudy water. Andrea Thuesen sings of Minnesota, mosquito bites and Saint Paul summers, despite never having set foot in the state. “Sometimes people relay stories to you in such a way that you feel like you’re a part of it,” she explains. “And if you’re really close to them spiritually, even more so. Like you share a reality that exceeds the frame of your relationship. You become part of the other person’s whole life, even the parts you weren’t around for.” Memory, even imagined memory, becomes a ghostly collaborator.

‘Duality’ has been kind of a key word for this album

But snuggle’s genius is just as clear in their more oblique cuts. “Dust,” their apocalyptic love song, leans on a funky drum loop and dream-pop shimmer, conjuring cicadas, melting ice cream, and David Lynch visions of burning cities. Humor and fear feel equally present. “It definitely draws a parallel to everyday life,” Thuesen says. “A regular rollercoaster of ups and downs, conflicting feelings and experiences coexisting. It’s what life is made up of, I reckon. ‘Duality’ has been kind of a key word for this album—both lyric, composition and production wise. Working with contrasts like organic and synthetic, humor and melancholy, digital and analogue etc.”

Elsewhere, “Marigold” buries a cello under jagged guitar and slyly anthemic lyrics, turning intimacy into blunt secrecy. Much of Goodbyehouse’s texture emerged through improvisation and authenticity. “A lot of it comes from improvising and keeping the mistakes,” Strange says. “An acoustic guitar left bare, a drum machine slightly off, strings treated more like voices than instruments. Those things just kept happening and started to feel central to how we sound.”

Throughout, Goodbyehouse grapples with displacement: losing a café job of nearly a decade, saying goodbye to a childhood home, watching grounding points vanish. The record feels like a meditation on leaving safety, on stepping into a future that is both exhilarating and terrifying. Thuesen and Strange translate that duality into songs that are lush but unsettled, soft but restless, always circling an unspoken question. At the end of the album, “Water in a Pond” distills the band’s ethos most poignantly: a gloomy, self-aware love song carrying equal parts sorrow and devotion. It sounds like two people trying to hold still in a world that won’t stop shifting.

Snuggle releases on Escho, the Copenhagen label that has consistently set the agenda for adventurous Scandinavian music. Thuesen is quick to stress that the community is real but not monolithic: “It’s great being in close proximity to these great artists and friends and having a community around music and the label. But we’re all artists in our own capacity that make very different music and I don’t think I really consider us a joined ‘scene’ in that sense.” Alongside luminaries like Fine, Astrid Sonne, Smerz, and Elias Rønnenfelt, snuggle extend the label’s tradition of treating fragility, intimacy, and experimentation not as contradictions but as the lifeblood of contemporary pop. Now that they said ‘Goodbyehouse‘, snuggle themselves describe what comes next simply: “Touring the world, keep at it with writing and composing, keep on rocking!”

The record was born in Los Angeles, a place they’d long envisioned through the strange glow of cinema. “We’d always imagined LA through the lens of David Lynch: saturated in surrealism, a little menacing, a little magical — and that’s exactly how it felt. A puzzling, but beautiful cultural shock,” they recall. That atmosphere saturates the whole album, from the opener “Delusional On Sunset Boulevard” to the ghostly closer, “Silver Lake Mystery Forest.”

For Pearly Drops, Hollywood is more symbol than setting. “At its heart, this album is about the emotional unraveling that can happen when you chase a dream too hard—when fantasy and ambition start to bleed into your sense of identity,” they explain. The result is autofiction: storytelling as self-portrait, where fantasy landscapes mirror very real struggles with identity, ambition, and burnout.

Musically, the record is packed with moments that linger. “Demonlover” builds into a feverish climax, its final pulse echoing like a heart machine. “Ratgirl” takes the listener underground, a dance track wrapped in neon shadows that throbs with the sting of disillusionment, haunted by promises that never arrive. And “Silver Lake Mystery Forest” ventures into experimental territory, with a warped and otherworldly finale where sound itself seems to twist and breathe.

The duo’s process remains deeply personal. “We don’t identify as an indie rock band, but we don’t feel like an electronic act either,” they explain. “We composed, wrote, produced and mixed the entire album just the two of us with our own hands. Sandra has also painted all the cover arts by hand. For our artistic expression, it’s important to see through the whole process ourselves.”

Their inspirations seep into every note. Lynch’s Mulholland Drive is a guiding spirit: “There would be no Pearly Drops as we know it without David Lynch. His influence on us, even on a personal level, cannot be overstated. His film Mulholland Drive seems to make more sense as we grow older… and has inspired our third album immensely.”

The gear is equally essential. “This synthesizer has found its way into nearly every song we make,” they say of the Moog Minimoog Model D. “It doesn’t have presets, so each sound must be shaped from scratch. It’s a beautiful instrument, one that continues to offer us endless inspiration.” Polyphonic synths like the Juno-106 and Prophet-10 also run through the record: “In our hands it always feels like holding Angelo Badalamenti’s Twin Peaks soundtrack at our fingertips.”

Beyond instruments, their aesthetic pulls from unexpected corners. “For some reason, we’ve always seen Italian Giallo films, especially Dario Argento’s Suspiria, and Rondò Veneziano‘s album La Serenissima as part of the same continuum,” they note. “It’s like a mashup of two worlds: ’70s and ’80s supernatural horror fantasy intertwined with Baroque pop. It lingers with us, and honestly, we’re not sure that’s such a bad thing.”

Semi-modular synths added another layer of unpredictability. “There are no presets, so you get to build and patch every sound from the ground up. That’s led to a lot of unexpected and wonderfully messy results, which you can hear in tracks like ‘Demonlover,’ ‘Pillow Face,’ and ‘Silver Lake Mystery Forest.’ It’s almost like those songs passed through an imaginary David Lynch or Dario Argento filter on our way to Hollywood.”

By the time the record fades out, Pearly Drops have taken listeners through an eerie yet deeply human dreamscape. “It feels like with this third album, we bottled up that feeling of losing your mind and your identity when trying to chase your dreams — whatever they happen to be,” they reflect. Strange, beautiful, and haunted by disillusionment, The Voices Are Coming Back is Pearly Drops‘ boldest and eeriest work to date.

 

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“Cold pop” may sound like a gimmick, but it makes sense when you hear it. “It was actually coined by Big Jeff from Bristol,” the band explain. “To us it reflects a certain dark edge in the music and a collective directness.” There are echoes of The xx in the skeletal arrangements and frosted edges, but thredd sidestep imitation with a sharper rhythmic drive and a willingness to let their songs smolder rather than simply brood. On opening track “Horseshow,” Will’s post-trip hop drum programming locks into Max’s uncanny harmonic instincts, while Immy’s vocals hover like condensation on glass, fragile but insistent. “Horseshow for me,” Will adds, “presents a strong imagery that is conjured up by the writing and production working in harmony… it’s a nice balance of tongue in cheek but seriousness.” The result isn’t frigid so much as suspended, the kind of pop that resists warmth until it suddenly cracks open.

“We just didn’t have time to question a lot of decisions”

The immediacy of It’s Lovely, Come On In stems directly from its origins. “We just didn’t have time to question a lot of decisions,” they say of their Laylow residency. “It was really beneficial because a lot of it was based purely on instincts as a group.” That urgency thrums through the record: “We Don’t Speak Anymore” lashes out with a one-day’s work volatility, while “Funny Girl” strips everything to bare confessions. Immy recalls, “The lyrics were pulled from a vulnerable notes app entry I’d made a while back… I felt like I’d given a very raw and real bit of myself to the process. I felt more glued-in after that.”

During those weeks holed up at Laylow, the band also immersed themselves in shared listening sessions that seeped into the creative process. “Britney — In The Zone. Radiohead — TKOL RMX 1234567. Massive Attack — Mezzanine,” they list, alongside Metronomy and other 90s touchstones. You can hear that spectrum play out across the album. “Party”’s dance-floor surge echoes Britney’s pop ambition, while “Something For My Head” channels trip hop’s heavy-lidded tension. “’Something For My Head’ or ‘Horseshow’,” they reflect, “both capture the basement of Laylow in different ways… it was November, freezing cold, we were the only ones in the building.” That sense of isolation is baked into the tracks themselves, a reminder of the peculiar environment that birthed them.

thredd feel right at home with Scenic Route

What holds the album together is a refusal to sand down the edges. “The album never really got mixed,” they admit. “All the sounds and layers in it exist as they were recorded in, with barely any tweaking afterwards. Long live compression.” Scenic Route, the label behind the release, has built its reputation on spotlighting artists who thrive in the margins, and thredd feel right at home there. It’s Lovely, Come On In doesn’t posture as a grand statement: it’s too immediate, too unvarnished for that. Instead, it captures a fleeting moment of collaboration and survival, a snapshot of three musicians throwing their ideas into the air and watching them land in uncanny harmony.

And that atmosphere remains tethered to place. Asked to name one location that embodies the record, the band are quick to answer: “Laylow, specifically the room at the top where there were old clothes, bottles of booze, mannequins and a massive bath.” Like that room, the album is cluttered and uncanny, but charged with unexpected magic. It’s not a debut that tries to prove too much, it just opens the door and invites you into its peculiar vibe.

Her songs are immersive soundscapes, taking after the slowly evolving, ambient textures of artists like Julianna Barwick or Grouper, but still uniquely her own: quirky, colourful, contemplative and uplifting, often evocative of a hot and peaceful summer night characterised by the buzz of crickets.

Her most recent record, Dominant Heartstrings exemplifies her artistic confidence 10 studio records in, with sound design rich in compelling, lo-fi qualities and Elsa’s vocals stronger and more captivating than ever.

Below we present an interview with Elsa, conducted in summer 2024 while she was performing a series of shows across the UK, and also working on Dominant Heartstrings.

HighClouds: How are the live shows going?

Live shows are going well, people have responded very positively. Everyone who has heard the new songs seems to be in agreement that they’re bangers.

I’m enjoying being away from the computer and having a simple set-up that I can tweak, switch and add on to quite easily. I’m also enjoying recording new sounds to add into the set, along with the journey, although it’s something that I was already doing with my improvised ambient sets that I was touring in October 2021.

I’ve noticed my singing has come through when I perform the songs, sometimes unsurprisingly. I’ve been learning a lot of singing technique in the last month after spending my whole life refusing to have lessons due to a fear of sounding like everyone else.

I have realised that it’s more important to protect my voice, and get more freedom, elasticity and power in it, so I’ve started learning from teachers on YouTube. Things have massively shifted forward since making certain discoveries. Plus, some of the songs I’m performing are quite hard to sing due to them being quite a high register for me, with lots of words.

How difficult is to recreate your fairly experimental records in a live setting? Are there recurring challenges, or at this point in your career is the process really natural?

I have tried many different ways of doing solo electronic live sets over the past 7 years. I know now where my limits are in terms of how much I can be doing at one time without getting flustered and not being able to fully feel the flow of the music.

Now I have pretty well established the approach I enjoy, that strikes the right balance. I do enjoy applying it in slightly different ways to all the new songs. Each song provides different opportunities as well as limitations.

One of the main challenges for me is to stand up and being seen without getting shy, without necessarily having to busy myself behind lots of activity to distract myself from the attention.

I’ve been very aware for a long time about this perceived pressure that I need to look like I’m doing loads of stuff, when the reality is there is only so much that I can do alone without completely stripping it back and playing something different to the recordings.

I find a blend is always best. I would love to have a band to figure out completely live versions of my songs.

Elsa Hewitt by Darius Williams

You started recording your 2024 record Chaos Emeralds in lockdown. How did that affect it?

Lockdown imbued it with a certain atmosphere, there was like a mixture of tension and stillness, unusual and new emotions, much sadness and uncertainty, collective feelings, chaos and confusion, all of that was feeding into it.

The music I was making was like the transmutation of these energies, abstract expressions, the sprouts of personal and collective transformation. There was also this renewed sense of love for nature and an appreciation of everything in the immediate environment.

You’ve spoken about how music gave you satisfaction and security when you were young. What do you think the link is between music and mental health?

Music is so evocative, in a spiritual way. It’s a pattern of resonance. When you like certain music it’s because it resonates with you on an energetic level, so in many ways it reminds you that you’re not alone and reflects the beauty of your life back to you.

Equally, it’s the gel that brings people together. I think it can help you tap into your underlying emotions and feelings, and can help you gain a higher perspective because of that. It helps you release what is stuck and move with what is coming through. So, it’s very important.

You used to live and study in Toulouse, France. How did living there affect your growth as a musician?

I did a lot of jamming with musicians I met there. Before going there, I had just made my first electronic album (Hotel Rosemary), so I brought my synth along with me and performed songs from it while I was there.

However, because of the solitude of being in a new place I ended up writing a whole album of songs acoustically, developing my finger picking, writing more in French, listening to a lot of dance music and jamming with a lot with other people. I ended up with a lot of ideas.

Which music comforts you the most nowadays?

I’ve found comforting vibes recently when listening to Terry Riley, Kirk Barley, Lonnie Holley, Ulla; artists I listened to a lot when I was younger, like PJ Harvey and The Beach Boys.

Also, folk music that other people put on, vintage classics and instrumental hip hop beats, especially those made by my friends.

Dominant Heartstrings is out now on Elsa’s own imprint ERH Records.

Originally formed in Lima, Peru by Adele Fournet and Felipe Wurst, Brooklyn-based group Tipa Tipo isn’t afraid to mix sounds, textures, and ideas. Their music melds genres and melodies, breaking new ground as they fuse older pop conventions with Latin-inspired rhythms. On their latest release, “Grifo,” Tipa Tipo even blends languages. In the multilingual track, the group reflects on the connection between life and death, ruminating on the dead that live among us, from the animal carcasses that make the gas that fuels our cars to the bodies that sit in the graveyards in our communities. With its groovy baseline, Fournet‘s smooth vocals, and drummer Jordan Auber collaborated with funky drums, the track perfectly balances fun and fatalism in a flamboyant fashion.

But the buck doesn’t stop there for Tipa Tipo. The group has also released a visually and artistically astute music video, directed by the band’s very own Adele Fournet. The video features dynamic dancing and eye-catching backdrops. It’s a visual spectacular that romanticizes the dirty and wasteful, a dance that finds choreography in both natural and mechanical movement.

The resulting product is a track and accompanying video that are both meaningful and catchy. HighClouds was lucky enough to catch up with Tipa Tipo to discuss the process that went into creating “Grifo,” their headspace as they look toward releasing their first full-length LP, and the challenges and triumphs they’ve experienced since transitioning from Lima to the Brooklyn music scene. Read our entire conversation below, and don’t forget to stream “Grifo” as soon as humanly possible.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

HighClouds: Talk us through the process of writing and recording “Grifo.”

I wrote this song while in quarantine with the Omicron variant of COVID, and my window overlooked two gas stations at a big intersection in South Brooklyn. I wrote the opening lyrics in a feverish state while looking at the throbbing lights of those desolate stations. I saw the gas stations as homing beacons, calling all survivors after the apocalypse. The song grew into a meditation about life running on death, especially in the form of the liquid fossils that we pump into our vehicles for fuel. The second verse develops this theme further, but this time in the context of The Green-Wood Cemetery. This cemetery is very close to my house, and is one of my favorite places to spend hours admiring the enormous trees and imagining past lives of the people who nourish them.

We recorded “Grifo” at our studio in Brooklyn. Like many of our tracks, it was a process of reconstructing the Logic demo by replacing and augmenting the MIDI arrangements with real instruments. I knew that I wanted the instrumentation to juxtapose the mosquito-like electric guitars of old chicha recordings with the luscious electric pianos and synths of disco in order to conjure this hybrid genre we’ve been going for that we’re calling “tropical disco.” Highlights from the studio include recording with our Tipa Tipo drummer, Jordan Auber— Who really took the drums and percussion to a whole new level on this track– and recording a real vibraphone with our friend Erica Mancini. Getting Felipe‘s lead guitars to sound both danceable and annoying was also a fun challenge. We had a lot of fun creating the ambient disco vocal stabs that occur throughout the track by running many layers of harmonies through our SurfyBear spring reverb pedal. SurfyBear is definitely a big part of this track.

“Grifo” is a multilingual track, featuring both Spanish and English. Does your songwriting approach change when you compose in different languages?

We are a bilingual band, so in a way writing bilingual songs is the most intuitive and natural outcome. Felipe‘s native language is Spanish, my native language is English, and we talk all day in Spanglish. However, I’ve often feared that writing in two languages could alienate a listener – if the song starts in English, and then switches to Spanish, maybe the English-speaking listener could feel lost or confused, or vice versa? But with “Grifo,” the verses came to me so clearly in English, and the choruses in Spanglish, that it felt like the only way to do justice to the song was to write it in both languages.

The video for “Grifo” is super engaging with its unique shooting locations, trippy effects, and imaginative choreography. Where did the idea for the video come from? What was the shooting and editing process like?

The music video for “Grifo” takes place in three different Brooklyn locations that contrast the industrial and organic elements of the city—The gas stations that originally inspired the song, The Green-Wood Cemetery, and a scrap metal processing plant in Gowanus right next to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. I have a longstanding collaboration with the Peruvian choreographer and multidisciplinary artist Moyra Silva, in which we create site-specific dance pieces and installations that interrogate the relationship between human bodies and urban spaces. We did a site-specific videodance piece in Perú right before the pandemic, called “Limas Utópicas,” and were excited to have the opportunity to work together again after so many years. Moyra and I developed the movements for “Grifo” in response to the locations and the music, while implementing the imagery of oil pumps, machinery, connection, and running. I really like the aesthetic and feeling tone of non-narrative experimental films like Godfrey Reggio‘s Koyaanisqatsi, so we decided to blend the shots of our choreography with a collage of archival footage to create a series of tableaus portraying the relationship between fossil fuel consumption, death, and human connection.

While “Grifo” is an upbeat and dancey track, the video and lyrics certainly have fatalistic undertones. What is it like to create art when it feels like the world is ending?

The end of the world as we know it has always been a subject matter that interests me as a songwriter, but with a twist and a sense of humor. I love writing upbeat dance tracks about the world ending and fleshing out a lyrical portrayal of what that might look like. I think it makes me feel existentially better to sing about hard topics while everyone is dancing—It’s a catharsis in which we can hold opposing feelings at the same time. I love the science fiction writer Ursula Le Guin, in part because much of her world-building occurs in post-disaster scenarios. What do we do once the world as we know it ends? In “Grifo,” we have a dance party at the gas station as everyone stocks up on provisions.

Tipa Tipo was originally formed in Peru. Can you tell us more about your origin story as a band? What was it like adjusting to the scene in Brooklyn?

Felipe and I met in Lima in 2010 and started collaborating on original music soon thereafter. We played in a band called Humanimals and were in a small but blossoming experimental pop scene in Lima, with bands like Alejandro y María Laura, La Lá, and Kanaku y El Tigre. I got an opportunity to do a PhD program in Ethnomusicology at NYU, so we moved to New York and basically started over as musicians and artists in the US in 2013. The music scene in Brooklyn was enormous in comparison, and a lot more competitive and demoralizing. We stopped playing original music as a duo for many years and only played as supporting musicians for other people’s projects and worked on our own solo projects. Notably, I released a solo instrumental album in that time under my own name called Foremothers and Felipe was playing with the Latin experimental band La Mecanica Popular. In that time, we also started learning about production and engineering and slowly started to experiment more with analog recording techniques. We bought a Tascam cassette recorder and recorded our first EP as Tipa Tipo, which reignited our passion for creating original music despite the challenges of the New York scene. While living in Brooklyn we also developed a passion for Peruvian bands from the 60s, 70s, and 80s that were developing their a unique cumbia sound, including Los Orientales de Paramonga, Los Mirlos, and Los Destellos. These bands have gone on to influence our sound as we explore this nexus between tropical and disco.

Your new first full-length LP Cintas will be released early next year. What should listeners look forward to hearing on the record? What has been the biggest challenge in preparing for the release? What part of the process has been most joyous?

This record is an inflection point between the yacht rock en español we were doing with our previous EP, El Chari, and the dance-oriented tropical disco we’ve started pursuing more recently. The new album has songs that fall all along that spectrum. It’s taken two years to write and record Cintas, and we’ve especially enjoyed honing our process and techniques as producers and engineers. We’ve overcome a lot of creative fears when it comes to writing and recording, and are more fluid with our flow working individually and together. Some of the album was recorded to tape, some of it is digital—We just did whatever felt right for each song in each moment.

Now for a few quickfire questions. If you could open for any band or artist (alive, dead, active, broken up— everyone is fair game) on tour, what band or artist would it be?

Wings.

If you had to create a cocktail to pair with “Grifo,” what would the drink be?

Definitely a Chilcano with gas station ginger ale.

What will 2024 bring for Tipa Tipo?

Our album release, more shows, and more new music on the way!

Portuguese indie darlings Ditch Days are back, and they want you to get on your feet to groove. Recently returned from a successful European tour promoting sophomore record Blossom, the group (perhaps best known for viral track “Seth Rogen”) have come out with rollicking, synth-pop fantasia, “When It’s Over.”

Though “When It’s Over” details the failure of a relationship, it doesn’t sound like anyone is taking the heartbreak too hard. The lyrics set the scene, explaining, “I remember how we fell in love so fast / It was special / But it wasn’t mean to last.” As the chorus closes in, Ditch Days comes to a triumphant conclusion, “When it’s over / I’m never looking back at you.” While some break up songs may linger in despair, Ditch Days does the opposite—They’re celebrating the end, a welcome reprieve from the gloom and doom of other break up tracks. John Mayer can eat his heart out; Ditch Days are moving on, on the dance floor.

It may be surprising that Ditch Days— once known for their drippy, indie rock, dare-I-say shoegaze releases—would put out a synth-pop track. “When It’s Over” is the continuation of a new direction for the group, who have made a concerted effort to put out music that will get their fans to move. This airy, bright shift is a welcome change. We already know Ditch Days can churn out conked out indie rock tracks. The latest foray into dance music shows the versatility of a group spreading its wings while hitting their stride, which promises exciting things to come as the band teases even more new music in the coming months.

HighClouds was lucky enough to connect with José Crespo and Luís Medeiros of the band over email to ask a few questions about “When It’s Over.” The group opened about the inspiration and recording process for their recent releases, how writing about love and relationships can feel like group therapy, and what’s coming up next for the band. You can read our interview below. Just a heads up: It has been lightly edited for clarity and conciseness.

HIGHCLOUDS: Though “When It’s Over” is about a breakup, the overall vibe of the track is so fun, upbeat, and dancey. Could you talk a little bit about your inspiration for the song? What was the songwriting process like?

DITCH DAYS: I guess the obvious choice would be to write a sad song about a breakup, but sometimes relationships can grow to become more of a cage rather than a happy place. In those cases, having the courage and determination to put an end to it can only give you freedom; it feels right. You see a whole world of new chances in front of you. And that’s what we tried to focus on. The happiness that can come from an unfortunate situation. The song was [originally] written on the guitar, but we always had a more electronic-influenced arrangement in mind.

HC: It feels obvious to say, but recent single “Test of Love” and now “When It’s Over” both have a heavy focus on relationship dynamics. How did you decide to explore this theme? What are the challenges that come with writing about love?

DD: Part of it came from the need to create music that listeners could relate to. We’ve been quite abstract sometimes in the past, and our lyrics might have been harder to follow. With [our] recent songs, we’re taking the path of transparency, of being clear about what we want to convey. This naturally leads us to talk about relationships, a subject that means something to everyone. It’s hard work. We’re still learning how we want to talk about it and what are the bits we want to reveal from our own relationships. Sometimes, we find ourselves commenting on each other’s past relationships through the lyrics; it can become a bit of group therapy.

HC: Could you talk a bit more about your recording process for this recent batch of singles? Did anything surprising come up while recording “When It’s Over”?

DD: The biggest surprise to us was realizing that we could actually do it ourselves. We’ve always felt confident writing and arranging indie rock songs, but this time we set out to do something different, produce electronic beats, really explore synthesizers, and record most of it by ourselves. With a little help from some friends, like Zé Simples, (who opened up a world of weird samples) and Miguel Vilhena (our long-time producer who still makes sure the mixes and final outputs are as tight as possible), we are becoming much more confident within an aesthetic that was kinda foreign to us in the past. We’re excited about the opportunities that this opens up.

HC: You’ve used beautiful and evocative artwork for all of your singles. How did you decide on the art for “When It’s Over”?

DD: It’s easy when you have talented friends, like Ricardo Santos, who also happens to be an amazing graphic designer. When we played the songs to him, he was quick to envision an aesthetic for this collection of singles. It evokes feelings that can be complex, but much like our songs, he was able to still convey an aura of positiveness and vibrancy with each illustration. We love it, and you’ll definitely see more with upcoming singles.

HC: I see that you just completed a European tour supporting your sophomore record, Blossom. How did your touring experience shape your more recent releases? Additionally, how does being a band of Canadian-Portuguese members inform your music?

DD: Seeing how people react to your music in a live show gives insight into the energy and vibe of the songs, which can be hard to understand by yourself in the studio. That inspired us to write this batch of new, dance-floor friendly songs, which have electronic elements and are more “poppish” sounding. Additionally, in the last three or four years, we started listening to a lot of French-Canadian indie and dance music, and that has informed Blossom as well as the new songs we’re releasing right now. (We actually made a playlist that you can check out!)

HC: Your debut EP came out in 2016, which was some time ago. How has your music changed since then? If you could travel back in time and show Ditch Days from 2016 “When It’s Over,” what do you think would be most surprising about your 2023 sound?

DD: Crespo: When we started out, we only wanted to make music that fit into the “dreampop” genre. As we got older, we started branching out and experimenting more. We’re also trying to create a bigger connection with listeners via our lyrics by being honest and purposeful with the kind of stories and messages we tell (which is easier said than done). Probably the most surprising thing for our past selves would be finding out that we would write a song in french!

HC: If you could collaborate with any artist (alive or dead), who would it be?

DD: There are a lot of smaller artists doing really cool things right now with whom we’d love to collaborate, so I’ll give them a shoutout in no particular order: Malena Zavala, Ariane Roy, Kate NV, Marci, Molly Burch, Ruth Radelet, Moon Panda, MUNYA and Night Tapes. Let’s work together!

HC: If you had to create a specialty meal to eat while listening to the latest single “When It’s Over,” what would the dish be?

DD: “When It’s Over” would probably go well with a nice craft cider, like a Bordatto Basandere.

HC: What’s coming up for Ditch Days?

DD: For now, we’re focused on writing and releasing music on a regular basis so our listeners can count on new songs every two months or so. Besides that, we have some shows in Portugal planned for the end of the year (afraid we can’t say anymore about that!).

When our Google Meet video chat first connects, one of us is momentarily missing. “Let me give Katrín a call. She’s been so busy editing our new video,” explains Kari. We’d been working on making this conversation happen for some time, dating as far back as the release of debut album Visions of Ultraflex in 2020 when our initial plans for an interview were complicated by a worldwide pandemic. Almost exactly two years later—and after a sickness and a work emergency required us to reschedule a couple of times—we finally manage to make our lives align, despite being in three different countries in three different time zones.

Kari: I am feeling better, yes. Thank you. It was a little stomach bug. I have a son in Kindergarten, and so I’m learning about all the germs.

For the uninitiated, Ultraflex is the divine collaboration between Farao (Kari Jahnsen) and Special-K (Katrín Helga Andrésdóttir), musicians from Norway and Iceland, respectively, with their own individual projects, who found themselves both living in Berlin with mutual “musical crushes” on each other. We’ve written a number of times about them—about their sparkling 80s dance-pop gems, the friendship so apparent in their work, and the self-aware flamboyance of their music videos. But today there are no outrageous outfits, no aerobic choreography, no puzzling persona. Instead, Katrín is curled up in a comfortable chair at her home in Reykjavik, and Kari takes a break from parenting in Berlin, both of them gracious and genuine as we ask to hear more about how these solo artists teamed up to become a duo.

HighClouds: At this point in your career, I particularly enjoy revisiting the “Olympic Sweat” video. It’s like a literal representation of you two joining forces and becoming this new thing: Ultraflex. I’d love to hear more about how you first ended up working together. How did that opportunity come about? Also, at some point I read that the two of you met by being matched on Tinder—I imagine there’s no truth in that?

Kari (with a sly smile): No, we may have made up a couple stories.

Katrín: Extreme Chill [an annual experimental music festival in Reykjavik] contacted me because they wanted to commission a musical collaboration between an Icelandic artist and a Norwegian artist. When they asked me to participate, I said I would but only if I could choose the Norwegian artist. They agreed, and so I asked Kari to join.

Kari: Originally we made just one piece. But it was a lot of fun, so we kept going.

HighClouds: What kind of piece did you create for the festival?

Katrín: It was a raw version of what would become the Visions of Ultraflex album. We wrote it in nine days, but then we ended up fleshing it out at Kari‘s studio in Berlin.

Ultraflex by Jae Tyler

Ultraflex first landed on the HighClouds radar back in May 2020 with the release of their origin-story video to “Olympic Sweat,” a dreamy disco instrumental, save for one brief moment in the back-half where Kari and Katrin‘s heavily processed voices simultaneously announce, “Ultraflex.” Since then, that vocal snippet has become a recognizable “producer tag” of sorts, appearing throughout their expertly curated mixes for foundation.fm, NBHAP, and Refuge Worldwide, all of which are revelatory and should be listened to as soon as possible. The past couple years have also seen the band win the Icelandic Music Award for Best Electronic Album as well as the Kraumur Award for Best Album. Now they’re back with follow-up album Infinite Wellness—eight new tracks of shimmery, atmospheric, electro-disco-pop, overflowing with synth hooks, dance beats, and breathy vocals.

Kari: Second albums are very difficult. Now people expect something from you.

It’s an easily understandable concern; critics have written for years about the dreaded “sophomore slump.” The thought even prompted Kari and Katrín to work with a band therapist/coach who had them write out an actual manifesto, ultimately reminding themselves, “We’re doing this because it’s fun.” And it must have helped: the fun these two undoubtedly have working on this project together is on full display throughout Infinite Wellness. Everything we love about their debut remains intact here—from the phat, arpeggiating bass patches to their self-proclaimed “club rap” vocals that manage to be simultaneously soothing, suggestive, and sometimes a little silly.

Earlier this year we published write-ups of two tracks from the new album, “Baby” and “Mi Vuoi,” both of which are absolute jams that update the sonic blueprint laid out in Visions. But what really deserves some extra love right now is the final Infinite Wellness single and unexpected highlight, “Melting Away,” one of the more perfect distillations of the Ultraflex brand. Imbuing mildly naughty (but also honest and vulnerable) lyrics with lovely R&B melodies, K&K‘s vocals sit atop an elegant arrangement that tones down the exuberant bass stabs of other tracks, and instead places the focus on the gorgeous synth-chime top line, delicate keyboards, and enough echoey whispers and breaths, they’re practically instruments themselves. Add to that some Spanish-guitar flourishes, marimba-esque padding, and even what sounds like a shakuhachi flute sample (!), and you’ve got a sensual slow jam that alludes to certain 80s and 90s production accents found in hits by Madonna, Enigma, and Enrique Iglesias. Synthesized and processed through Ultraflex‘s particular aesthetic lens, however, the end result transcends pastiche; it’s the emotional climax of the album.

There’s no mistaking the meaning of these lyrics, which bluntly describe the private-yet-universal thoughts of someone feeling sexual hunger for another:

“You can try, but you can’t hide desire / There’s a heatwave between my thighs / You know that I think about you late at night / Fascination and arousal”

However, for all the “dirty talk,” this is also a song about falling for that person hard. Perhaps it’s the angelic harmonies, the way their vocal quality balances sensuality with a sense of innocence, or the awkwardness of admissions like, “You take my hand, I become butter,” but you don’t feel this way about just anyone you’re attracted to. The yearning here is just as much about partnership and true intimacy as it is about sex. With “Melting Away,” Ultraflex has created a mini-masterpiece that locates the exact line separating love and lust and indulges in that feeling.

The music K&K make as Ultraflex is, for the most part, quite a departure from their individual Farao and Special-K solo ventures. They collaborate on every aspect of the band, with each claiming their own specific areas of expertise—while Katrín focuses on lyrics, riffs, and the visual component, Kari handles the beats, synthesizers, and bass programming. And by sharing these responsibilities with someone so aesthetically connected with the other, it makes all the work of completing an entire album—and producing music videos to accompany fully three-quarters of it—a much more pleasurable and fulfilling experience.

Katrín: I played some of our songs for my boyfriend, and he described it as “shiny and dirty at the same time.” And I feel like that makes a lot of sense, actually. I can make a dirty song, but I can’t make it shiny.

Kari: And I’m the opposite, so it works very well. We’ve learned a lot from each other.

Of course, it’s always been difficult to separate Ultraflex‘s music from the visual element—to the point where it almost feels more appropriate to refer to them as an audiovisual project rather than a band. Make no mistake: their songs still work as pop singles, and their albums still function as organized collections of them. But where Ultraflex really makes a statement—eliciting a surprising range of different, sometimes-conflicting feelings—is when the entire enterprise is considered as a whole. (See the video to Infinite Wellness lead-off track, “Relax,” which felt uncomfortable the first time, hilarious the second, but most certainly never relaxing.) This especially makes sense upon learning that Katrín, an avant-garde visual artist in her own right, wrote her university thesis on the importance of image in popular music. And this sentiment—the notion that music, lyric, and visuals play equally vital roles in the art form of pop—absolutely shows in their work. Please: Block out a half-hour in your schedule and check out their absolutely essential CTM Festival performance from January 2021, which is so well- conceived, staged, and executed, it plays much more like a concert film than a livestream.

If the “Olympic Sweat” video is a manifestation of two artists’ worlds converging (two becoming one), then the CTM performance is the immediate result of what was born from that artistic merger (two as one). Right from the jump, this concept is literalized by way of a visual motif used throughout the concert. For the first two minutes, Kari and Katrín lean back in their matching papasan chairs—surrounded by a lush array of houseplants, cocktail in hand—slowly crossing and uncrossing their legs, repeatedly and completely in-sync. In another portion of the show the two engage in an aerobics routine and other synchronized, exercise-inspired movement. And elsewhere still, they play a tranquil top line together on the same keyboard—their hands an octave apart—gracefully extending their arms outward in unison as the synth-chimes reverberate and fade.

It’s a distinctive, idiosyncratic, and oddly satisfying take on choreography—partially inspired by the same 80s Soviet aerobics videos projected onto the screen behind them—and we occasionally see variations on this theme in their music videos as well: Kari and Katrín sensually swinging a single squash racquet together as one body in “Full of Lust,” or completing one-person house-cleaning chores as a two-person unit in “Mi Vuoi.” The imagery is striking and somewhat hypnotic, but also deceptively playful. Although their Ultraflex appearance can often come across as stoic or inscrutable—the duo staring directly at us with a piercing gaze that manages to suggest something between apathy and desire—it’s not too difficult to imagine the two of them cracking up the moment the camera cuts. Specific shots offer fleeting glimpses into what it might be like on set, like the moment toward the end of Infinite Wellness club banger “Rhodos,” K&K silly-dancing outside at night, when Kari suddenly bends over in uncontrollable laughter.

HighClouds: It seems like making Ultraflex music videos doubles as a great excuse for packing a picnic, hitting the thrift store, and spending the day hanging out with friends—whether that involves swimming in a lake, sightseeing and clubbing in Cairo, or hiking coastal hillsides.

Kari: Yes, exactly. We are both crazy hard-working and always super busy. Not like a group project in school where someone ends up doing a majority of the work. But we also like to have fun with creating this world. And incorporating our influences and things we enjoy into that world.

Katrín: Like that Celine Dion song you like.

Kari: Right. There’s this Celine Dion video [“Think Twice” from her 1994 album The Colour of My Love] that has a man in overalls working on an ice sculpture. I love it, and so in our new video we’re going to have a man in overalls working on an ice sculpture, too. We copy things we like, but it’s always filtered through our aesthetic sensibility. Most “original” ideas come about that way.

Katrín: We also like to collaborate with friends whose art we appreciate. Okay Kaya [a Norwegian-American musician from Oslo], for example, has directed a couple of our videos.

This love of collaboration was something we especially noticed upon the release of the fifth Infinite Wellness single, “Under the Spell,” which arguably acts as a kind of companion piece or sequel to “Never Forget My Baby” from Visions. Both videos feature and were directed by regular collaborator (Icelandic musician and visual artist) Jóhanna Rakel. The newer song begins, “Sometimes when I’m in my room, I put on a tune and dance by myself,” which, notably, is precisely what Jóhanna‘s character does throughout the older video. However, whereas dancing it out, here, represents a distraction from longing—a way to cope with the tedious ache that forbids forgetting—in “Under the Spell” dancing has now become an empowering tool to help the singer-narrator do just that:

“Sick of feeling tender / Can’t even remember you / All the things you said begin fading when I move / I forget about you”

Ultraflex proves music and dancing to be the versatile, healing balms they are.

By this point I’ve taken up enough of their time, and although I’m very aware that Katrín has a video to continue editing, and that Kari has a kid to put to bed before heading out to a show, they generously stay a bit longer to chat about some of their all-time favorite musical influences:

Kari: For me, it is this Estonian funk legend, Uku Kuut.

Katrín: Yes, Kari has introduced his music to me, he’s great. And I absolutely love Jarvis Cocker from Pulp.

Kari: And there’s always Britney.

Katrín: There’s always Britney… Cher. Janet [Jackson].

Kari: Oh, and our friends Easter. They’re a German-Norwegian duo, and they’re really great.

Katrín wants to know what I hear in their music, so I mention that moments of their “club rap” vocal style sometimes remind me of Neil Tennant from Pet Shop Boys (minus the eroticism), particularly his delivery in 1988’s “Left To My Own Devices.” It’s not quite singing, but it’s more than talking, and his melodic elongations of certain words (“phone up a friend who’s a paaarrty animal”) call to mind hooky moments like “mascaaarra down your cheeks, Bicaaardi in your drinks” from “Rhodos.” They were unfamiliar with the song, and so before saying goodbye, I promise to send them a link.

The Ultraflex project is endlessly fascinating and a world worth getting immersed in—there’s so much to discover in their music, their aesthetic sensibility, and their fandom of other music that, just when you think you’ve got them figured out, you realize that you don’t. Upon revisiting that PSB video myself, I was freshly reminded of the fact that it, too, features some (very different but no less awesome) exercise-inspired choreography, something I now appreciate within an entirely different context. Later that evening, I was enjoying my introduction to the sick 80s synth-boogie of an Estonian funk legend when I realized the album title Visions of Ultraflex must be a loving homage to Uku Kuut‘s collection of home recordings, Vision of Estonia. I couldn’t help thinking that this is what the pop music journey is all about—being influenced by something you love, sharing those influences with others, and perhaps using them to create something new, be it a song, an image, an emotion, or a combination of all three. And if you get the opportunity do that with a close, creatively like-minded partner and regular, admired collaborators… Well, that’s a rare and really beautiful thing. Some folks might even consider that a path to infinite wellness.

Infinite Wellness is out now on Kari‘s own Street Pulse Records. Grab a super-limited physical copy via Bandcamp below before it sells out.