Festivals Metronomy on returning to Dour Festival

A$AP Rocky, Vince Staples, Action Bronson and Skepta are among the names headed to the Belgian event this weekend which also boasts BATTLES, Fontaines DC, Death Grips, Octavian and Tirzah - plus DJ sets from Disclosure, Bonobo and among others.

We met up with Metronomy main man Joe to chat about their return to the festival!

You’ve already played a few festivals this summer - it must be nice to have been able to bring new songs along.

It’s amazing. Sometimes it’s not very cool to play new songs, like it’s not very fair on the crowd, but they’re going down really well, so yeah, it’s nice to be doing it.

…and as we speak you’re literally at a festival!

Yes, a festival called Jazzablanca, guess where it is?!

Where’s the strangest place you’ve played a festival?

The nicest weird place is probably here, it’s a racecourse in Casablanca which I guess is quite unusual.

What has been your previous experience of playing in Belgium?

It’s funny because you’ve got two different parts of Belgium, the French bit and the Flemish bit. The first part we played was the French bit, near Brussels, and the first time we went there it was the biggest show we’d ever done, so they’ve got an odd liking for us, the Belg-ers. And we’ve played at Dour before, and we associate it with playing some of the best, fun shows.

Obviously your new single is about an ice cream flavour - what are your other favourite ice cream flavours?

Where to begin…? I always instinctively go for chocolate, but as a child I went through a massive mint choc chip phase, I used to find it absolutely delicious. So chocolate is the top one, I like coffee, and obviously salted caramel. However, I detest rum and raisin. It’s just the raisins to me that seem odd. I used to work in a fudge shop, and we’d sell rum and raisin fudge and it basically all the crumbs of fudge would get put into the rum and raisin. So for me, you hide things in rum and raisin-flavoured stuff.