There’s not a lot that RÜFÜS haven’t conquered over the past three years. The dance-pop group, off the back of just a single début album, have managed to peak at #1 on the Australian charts, scored an ARIA award and cracked the US and European markets since just 2013. With follow-up Bloom out today, the future is looking pretty bright for the Sydney trio.
“We recorded the last album [2013’s Atlas] on my parents’ farm south of Sydney, so this time I think we really needed to isolate ourselve from the Australian scene and just really hole ourselves up,” says Jon George, who plays keys and synths for the group.
Rather than stay at home this time around, Bloom was recorded in the middle of a Berlin winter; the boys hiring a space for two months to live and breathe the record creation process.
“It was great, we could really just think about nothing else – we’d work till three or four o’clock in the morning, then head out and find a Berlin club where we’d hear something really new and exciting, then we could come back and just keep working.”
That complete immersion and isolation is tangible the whole way through Bloom: just as hit-ready as its predecessor, but with more intense and intricate layering, introspective lyrics and deeper themes in the tracks. The band’s time in Berlin, while inspiring an intense work ethic and constant commitment to the record creation process, was surprising to them in how much the isolation got to them at times.
“I mean, we’d pretty much been touring for two years straight but there were always home runs in between,” Jon says. “Sometimes we just isolated ourselves so much, and also Berlin at that time of year is just so cold, so there were times when we just wanted to leave and be back with our families and friends.”
The idea of distance runs through the record lyrically and in the cuts less made-for-radio that pop up on the back half of Bloom. While it certainly won’t isolate their existing fans to whom ‘Sundream’, ‘Take Me’ and ‘Tonight’ became staples, the album will invite a new crop of listeners through tracks like the rambling nine-minute ‘Innerbloom’.
It’s not….experimental, per se – there’s a safety in the record that matches the idealism and solidly traditional structure of Atlas – but it’s evidence of the band tapping slowly away from the formulaic indie-dance model and looking towards incorporating less conventional ideas.
Soundtracking their time in Berlin with artists like Tame Impala with the disco-fuelled psychedelia of Currents (Let It Happen’s success despite its length inspired ‘Innerbloom’), George Fitzgerald and Maribou State was exactly what they needed to prompt the thoughtfulness and intricacies of Bloom.
The album’s name itself, as well as referring to the band having virtually exploded over the past three years, is the term used to refer to a group of jellyfish – aquatic life, weirdly, was a constant stimulus during the band’s time writing and recording in Berlin.
[include_post id=”468772″]”We had all these jellyfish and under-the-sea scenes on our computers, and we just became obsessed with the wildlife and watching them float around,” Jon laughs.
Not only inciting dreamy, weighted sounds and a multitude of layered melodies and rhythms, the band used animal names as working titles for all the tracks on the album.
“Well, actually, it’s more me being a bit obsessive-compulsive than anything!” Jon laughs. “We had all these tracks sitting all over the computer, called, like, ‘sample 1’, ‘project 2’, and I just couldn’t deal with it, so we started giving them animal names going through the alphabet – like A for alligator, and so on. We had Komodo, chameleon, ocelot – some animals we’d never even heard of.”
As well as the most obvious radio-ready banger ‘You Were Right’ picking up an ARIA award at the end of last year, and ‘Like An Animal – one of the best-crafted songs on the record that is still immediately striking and likeable to any audience – it’s been a busy summer for the trio. Playing the three legs of Falls Festival, with huge main stage slots that brought out the vast majority of punters, was a full-circle moment, and the ideal way to round off a year of irregularity and change with a run of home shows to the audiences who first embraced them.
“We had all our family and friends down to the Byron Bay leg, and that was just so special for us- it was really a celebration of what a crazy year we’ve had, and coming from playing small Falls slots before it totally did come full circle.”
So what’s next for the band who success seems to follow everywhere they go? It’s time to keep chipping away overseas, of course. Playing Coachella this year (as RÜFÜS Du Sol, thanks to an awkward name clash with Chaka Khan’s backing band), the US market is starting to catch onto the band, with songs playing in ad campaigns as well as some solid radio airtime.
“We’re finding it much harder in Europe, actually. We do shows and lots of Australians come and we’ve played some great festivals and people have liked it, but there are so many people doing this stuff over there, whereas in America people are starting to take note,” Jon says, ever the realist.
2016 sees one of our best dance exports of the moment jaunt around America and the elusive Europe, in the hopes everything will catch on and stick as it has in Australia. However it all goes, one thing’s for sure – the trio show no sign of slowing down anytime soon, and with a streak of triumphs and unwavering support like RÜFÜS have gathered in no time at all, why on earth would you?
Bloom is out today via Sony.
