Reborn with a new retro house-inspired sound, Django Django’s new double-album Off Planet is a flurry of hypersonic colours and energy. We spoke to the band’s cofounder David Maclean about the record’s influences, tech and evolution…

Few artists have the deft ability to genre-hop without alienating vast swathes of their audience, but for Django Django, and the four-part Off Planet expanding their sound palette to channel the vibe of their formative dance music influences, as well as introduce an array of guest lead vocalists, has yielded a galaxy-sized bounty. Take the Self Esteem-fronted Complete Me, a pulsing slice of early ’90s rave-pop, led by one of the UK’s most in-demand vocalists. Then there’s the Jack Peñate-centred No Time, a joyous slice of euphoria, pre-soundtracking the baking summer we’re set to have this year. Cuts that sound a world away from Django Django’s earlier work, yet share an exploratory through-line with them.

More machine than man: Django’s synth-station overlord Tommy Grace

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Founded in 2009, the stuttering indie-rock oddity Default launched the four-piece as an unconventional addition to the UK’s indie canon. Subsequent records found the troupe investing in more ’80s synth-pop influences (Marble Skies) and sci-fi tinged psych-rock (Glowing in the Dark). Now Django’s core creative instigator – former house DJ and beatcrafter David Maclean – felt it was time to gearshift into a dimension not a million light-years from the dance music culture that he spent much of his youth living.

We asked David how the record found its shape: “The starting point for this album actually goes back a long way. A lot of this music and the beats and stuff were kind of on old hard drives. I’ve been making music since the 1990s and there’s bits and bobs from that era that were still floating around. During lockdown, I was forced to go back to old ideas. The timeline is a bit all over the place, but I guess it was lockdown that forced me to spend a long time thinking about it, that was the starting point.”

“I want to make tracks without worrying if they ‘sound’ like Django Django”

Forming the band with a group of co-students at the Edinburgh College of Art – Vincent Neff, Jimmy Dixon and Tommy Grace – Maclean has been at the forefront of the band’s questing sonics. With Off Planet, David explains that the journey to this point has been a roadmap-free ride: “We’d made the first self‐titled album which was, like, a bit of a fluke, we made it not really knowing what the hell we were doing. We just made it. Then the second, third and fourth albums represented us striving to make albums that had all the right flow and the right textures and stuff. We really put a lot of time into how they sounded as albums. That dictated a lot of the tracks that went on there.”