Interview Death From Above 1979: “There was unfinished business”

Of course, this outsider ethos is somewhat at odds with the band’s now-legendary stature, but they remained cautious once the bridges were rebuilt and the 2011 reunion tour announced. “We needed to see if there were real fans out there; real, active, excited people, and not just people talking about us on the internet,” continues Grainger. “It was sort of an experiment initially,” says Jesse – the first of many occasions in which the band refer to their actions as experimental. “When we started playing together and once our band was available to book again… does anyone actually want to see us when it’s possible to, or is it something people just talked about? We didn’t know. We were just sort of following along and seeing what happened.” And once the reunion proved to be a success? “We knew we could just keep playing the same songs!” he jokes. “At that point we’d just be the best Death From Above covers band ever; not an actual living band, making music. We wouldn’t have been interested in continuing if we weren’t making new music; if the band still wasn’t a living thing. I wanted to make more music. There was an unfinished business creatively.”

But the duo were hardly creatively void in their half-decade apart. Sebastien fostered a relatively successful solo career, and they both dabbled in electronic and dance music, most notably with Jesse’s work as one half of MSTRKRFT. “For me, one of the greatest things in terms of the evolution of this band is that we’ve gone off and done different things and had separate compartments for those ideas,” admits Sebastien. “When you’ve just got the one outlet and a lot of ideas, there’s this desire to bring all those different ideas into the one package and lose focus.” Jesse agrees: “It keeps Death From Above pure in a sense, because we’re not gonna contaminate it with all our other impulses – those impulses have other homes. So Death From Above can retain this pure form.”

Maintaining the purity of Death From Above is something the pair seem to see as a duty. Sebastien sows the seed: “After all that time, and having so many people tell us that the record that we’d made, it meant so much to them, what we really learned when we did this reunion tour of sorts is… the band exists separate from us, and we have evidence in all those years that that was the case. So then, when we were working on this new record, the pressure – if there was any pressure apart from the pressure we put on ourselves in general - was that we didn’t want to do anything that would take away from that legacy. We didn’t want to do anything that would cheapen it or ruin it for people who cared so much about it. In a sense they cared more about it than we did, because they kept going with it when we hadn’t. Maybe that was us realising that the band is this other thing.”

So as Death From Above approach the release of their second record ‘The Physical World’, they speak of their legacy as if they’ve taken on another member. ”In this era, the script is kind of half-written. The feeling of it is very different - like we mentioned before, the concept of the band being a third, separate thing. But also, we had people trust us now. The labels we work with and even the fans. We were a weird band - there weren’t a lot of other two-piece bands going around when we started, even The White Stripes were out of my consciousness. So this band has always been a bit of a fight for us, and now we don’t have to fight so hard.”

“The benefit of time on the perception of what we’re doing now is massive,” continues Jesse. “If we had released this record and had never gone away, and had just been a presence all the time, I don’t know if it would have been received as it is now, which is incredible for us… but I’d prefer not to have to go away in order to keep it interesting!” he laughs.

“I think it’s a matter of also continuing to be objective about it,” Sebastien muses. “There’s a lot of bands that just should have stopped a while ago. And then there’s bands like Spoon that keep putting out records, and the records are always good. If we can do that, that’s cool. I’ve seen bands since our reunion take our template and go ‘fuck, can we do that? Can we break up for a few years and then come back bigger than we were before?! Let’s try it out!’” he concludes, finally allowing admittance to the band’s influence in perhaps the most cynical of ways, “but I don’t think you can replicate this experiment.”

Taken from the September issue of DIY, out now. Death From Above 1979’s new album ‘The Physical World’ is out now via Last Gang Records / Caroline / Fiction.

Tags: Death From Above 1979, From The Magazine, Features, Interviews