When electronic music superstars Röyksopp released ‘The Inevitable End’ in 2014, they pledged that it would be their final full-length record, thus completing their six album cycle. They also pledged they would return with new music in other forms as and when time was right. Their new single, the standalone ‘Never Ever’, is them coming good on that promise with an unabashedly club-ready track influenced by late-period disco and ‘80s electronic pop.
Listen to the track via YouTube here:
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In Röyksopp terms it’s closest, probably to “Do It Again” with Robyn from the 2014 EP of the same name, but really, they’ve not done anything quite like this before. “The track has its own cosmos and it’s own place” says Svein Berge.
“Never Ever” marks another collaboration between the Norwegian pair and Sundfør: she also appears on The Inevitable End tracks “Running To The Sea” and “Save Me”. If the aim for the duo was to lead Sundfør into a new artistic realm, the same applies to Röyksopp as a unit.
Releasing themselves from the albums cycle has freed the duo up to explore new ideas and opportunities, such as their track for Rick Rubin’s Star Wars Headspace album, which challenged musicians including Flying Lotus to make songs using sounds from the Star Wars universe. The latest fruit is “Never Ever“. The next? Who knows. “The whole idea of us going away from the whole album concept was that we do have many musical expressions that we want to do,” says Torbjørn. “One of them might be a club track, but we don’t necessarily want to do an album of it. It’s that way with “Never Ever” – we love it, but we don’t need 12 tracks like it.“
Withdrawing from the album cycle hasn’t led to procrastination. In fact, they say they’re “more focused than ever”. The pair take months out to write together in seclusion, during which time they keep strange hours, grow beards and transcend to whatever plane they’re taken. “We tend to work in phases where we go a bit more Bohemian in the writing period, where we just disappear, Torbjørn and myself, and have strange, long hours. The world outside doesn’t really exist for us and vice versa,” says Svein. “Then we go back to our normal lives and revisit what we created in our alternated state and work out what needs to be tweaked and produced.”
With the freedom to release music as the songs themselves demand, future projects will come in many forms, whether compilations, EPs, or something else entirely. One idea they’re working on is for a series of tracks that explores a counterpoint to the super-clean sound of modern electronic music. “I think we would like to further our exploration into the analogue world, like the early years of electronic music, where synths and drum machines would be used in combination with more traditional acoustic and analogue instruments. Like we’ve done in that past, but take it even further,” says Svein. “We have a flair for symphonic prog rock and early synth stuff – and we’ve always had our base in the analogue outboard domain. So that’s a place we want to revisit and explore even deeper. And we’d want to make more than one track.” Torbjørn adds: “We need to make something that sounds dirty in the right way. We like clean too, but there’s too much clean-sounding electronic music being released right now.”
But the duo aren’t planning on looking back just yet. This is the inevitable new beginning.
“Never Ever (feat. Susanne Sundfør)” by Röyksopp is out now on Pod via Inertia Music.
Get it here: https://inertia.lnk.to/Royksopp
