“We feel like this is a goodbye to the traditional album format, In our consecutive run of albums, we have been able to say what we want to say and do what we want to do with the LP. We’re not going to stop making music, but the album format as such, this is the last thing from us…”
With the announcement of The Inevitable End, Röyksopp’s fifth and final record, came that opaque statement. It’s clear enough in terms of the finality in their decision yet they give little away behind their reason to give the album format its swan song.
Svein Berge and Torbjørn Brundtland are no different over the phone when quizzed about why they feel they’ve said all that they needed to say with the format. The give articulate answers yet refrain from disclosing anything too explicit.
“It’s time for us to look in other places and see if there’s other things that we can do as opposed to keep repeating ourselves,” says Berge.
As far as musical entities go Röyksopp are far from the repetitious type, although what Berge is saying has more to do with the duo’s meticulousness than their fear of boring their fans.
It has been four years since the introspective instrumentals of Senior were released and the musician is a firm believer that the duo will have a greater output in the future by abandoning the LP.
“Because we are so specific when it comes to picking the sounds and making the music just the way that we want it to be and also the fact that we want our albums to be so cohesive and to conceptually have a thin red line through it we find that it can be time consuming,” says Berge.
“So we have abandoned that to make shorter releases similar to that of Do It Again, that we did with Robyn, which will make for a higher frequency of releases.
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Not only that, but as Berge claims there’s a certain degree of flexibility in terms of the experimentation that you get with shorter releases that a full length doesn’t quire allow for.
“Just for the sake of argument rather than trying to make a full (length) hip-hop album, which would probably take a lot of time for us, we could perhaps piece together three or four tracks and try to do that just because we think it’s interesting,” he says.
While a hip-hop Röyksopp release is probably unlikely to materialise anytime soon, just what the future of the duo holds is a tantalizing prospect, one in which they refuse to indulge us in.
“We have a lot of ideas, but we don’t want to give it all away,” says Berge, and while that future doesn’t involve the LP the duo are adamant that the format isn’t going to be irrelevant as some in the industry have speculated at certain points of the last decade.
“I think it’s going to be there still for a long long time to those very dedicated people that are still buying vinyl and were still buying vinyl when the CD was peaking and vinyl and cassettes were considered redundant and it’s going to be those same people who will always be there” affirms Berge.
“Those people who have a specific and interest in the product so it’s not going to disappear and it’s not going to be irrelevant, but music is being consumed so different these days.”
You can count the duo amongst those LP enthusiasts too. Berge is insistent that they’re abandoning the album because they “love it”.
“We don’t want it to be tainted, we’ve obviously grown up with it and this album, The Inevitable End, if anything, is a homage to the album format.”
That’s a clearer answer behind their reason to leave the album format behind than what they initially first told us, but Röyksopp still remain fairly cryptic about the contents of their latest record.
It’s their most lyric heavy release yet, but it still contains the mystique that’s integral to the duo and the open interpretations that can come with their instrumentals.
Email subscribers were treated to early streams of individual tracks from the record throughout the lead up to its release, with each one accompanied by an ambiguous statement.
“To once again be allured by an insisting promise of an even higher high – and once again solemnly swear “never again” and renounce such conduct. Repeat. Repeat.”
And so reads the description that came with the link to ‘Save Me’, which features vocals from Norwegian singer-songwriter Susanne Sundfør.
As Brundtland says, “we really give from ourselves in this album and it’s a very personal album, so it’s fair to say that it has been a journey to make this album”.
So it’s hardly surprising then that the duo are keeping their cards close to their chest.
While the specifics are blurred there is no doubt that T.I.E. is Röyksopp’s most outwardly emotional record of their career.
Statements like “I don’t remember anymore what I used to be” sung by Jamie McDermott of the Irrepressibles on ‘I Had This Thing’ and “you’re just so fucking wrong” emoted by Robyn on ‘Rong’ confirm a melancholic yearning of the mistakes of yesteryear.
The increased focus on lyrics came, as Berge put its, because of several reasons.
“We wanted this to be a dynamic, sincere and heartfelt album that kind of went in a different direction. Obviously we have the feeling within the realms of electronic music, but in this day and age where electronic music is omnipresent, basically pop music nowadays is electronic music. I guess we felt that there’s no need for us to be doing that to such a large extent now.”
It’s an almost antithesis to what we’ve come to expect from a band hailed as ‘electronic maestros’, tired of a world overflowing with beats, they’ve kept their core sound, but allowed new dispositions to take hold of their latest record.
“The Inevitable End, if anything, is a homage to the album format.”“We’ll be doing what we want to do and that’s why we felt we’d want to deal with songwriting and also spend a bit of time on creating interesting sentiments and write lyrics that mean something to us,” explains Berge.
The lyrical intimacy of the T.I.E is a dynamic to Röyksopp that fans are less used to hearing, it has been explored intermittently throughout their past work, but not to an extent which is this personal.
Such a development informed the duo’s decision to seek out male voices for the record.
“Since we were putting so much of ourselves in these lyrics we wanted it to have a certain male presence,” says Berge, although both Robyn and Susanne Sundfør have a considerable presence on the record as well.
Berge continues; “We wanted it to have an array of different sentiments, but we wanted it to be in the vein of – to use a word that I hate to use – melancholy and sadness and a feeling of loss so we wanted to have a voice that could feel credible, believable and sincere, but also a bit theatrical at the same time.”
While the female voices of T.I.E are the pop highlights of the record (see ‘Monument’ and ‘Running To The Sea’), Berge’s sentiments are most apparent in the brooding additions of ‘Compulsion’ (with Jamie McDermott) and ‘Sordid Affair’ (with Ryan James of Man Without County).
Still, as far as 2014 is concerned it’s hard to think of a Röyksopp collaboration that is more prevalent than the propulsing pop number of ‘Do It Again’. The duo’s relationship with Swedish singer Robyn has turned out a few gems before (‘None Of Dem’, ‘The Girl And The Robot’) but it’s fair to say their work as a trio is best represented with the release of their mini-album earlier this year.
Brundtland describes a “magical chemistry” when working with Robyn and that it “it feels like anything is possible, it just feels so limitless when we work (together), it’s like a dream scenario”.
So does that mean the band that is Röyksopp and Robyn could have future releases in them?
“I cannot possibly count that out, we have a really good relationship and friendship, we socialize outside of making music, so I don’t see why not. I mean sure, we’re bound to do something again at some level,” confirms Brundtland.
A Robyn solo album will come first. The duo wouldn’t reveal much, but they would say she’s hard at work and “you’re in for a treat if you’re a Robyn fan so just be patient”. That’s not to mention Robyn has also revealed she’s working on more material with Kindness after guesting on this year’s Otherness in a Swedish TV interview.
But for the meantime the future of Röyksopp and their future collaborations is pure speculation. The inevitable end it might be for the duo and their relationship with the album format, but what comes next is far from clean cut. It’s as unambiguous as the contents of T.I.E. What is clear though is that the future of Röyksopp just blew wide open.
The Inevitable End is out now through Inertia.
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