Daphni - Butterfly

It has never been entirely clear quite where Caribou ends and Daphni begins; the two musical alter-egos of Canada-born, UK-based Dan Snaith ultimately exist within the same musical sphere, and the popular interpretation is perhaps that Caribou has been the more genre-fluid and experimental of the two projects, whilst Daphni is an outlet for straight-up dance music.

With the release of this fourth album under the latter name, the question becomes whether the line between the two has ever been quite this blurred. It was already clear that Dan’s club work was colouring Caribou both on the last album under that name (2024’s ‘Honey’) and its subsequent live tour, and now, the lead single from ‘Butterfly’, ‘Waiting So Long’, arrives billed as a Caribou-Daphni collaboration. That’s probably down to the presence of a vocal - usually absent from Daphni tracks - but the song’s whole feel is representative of the album in microcosm; ebullient and celebratory.

That track plays like a heart-on-sleeve paean to Dan’s early-‘90s French house influences, but ‘Butterfly’ is a real sonic smorgasbord: across 16 songs, there is rhythmic experimentation (‘Miles Smiles’), propulsive high-tempo house (‘Shifty’) and cuts to soundtrack the night’s dying embers (the gorgeous ‘Good Night Baby’ being a standout). To view ‘Butterfly’ through a critical lens is to understand that Dan is increasingly using Daphni as a tool with which to broaden the horizons of his own understanding of dance music; to simply to take it at face value, though, it might already be the most relentlessly feel-good album of 2026.