TRACK-BY-TRACK: DARCY BAYLIS TAKES US THROUGH 'EMOTRONICA'
Emotronica is out now.
Image: Elsa Gottvall.
Australian producer and songwriter Darcy Baylis has unveiled his new album, Emotronica. To celebrate the release, he's taking us through the collection of songs track-by-track...
I THOUGHT I SAW YOU SIGNALING
Like most of the songs on this record, there’s a version of this that existed for years before it came out. The vocal melody from the start of the first verse until the end of the pre, which is just really classically emo, had been looping in my head for years before it had any words. I wanted to create the feeling of an anthemic album opener in the vein of “Maybe Memories” or “It’s Far Better to Learn,” while using only sounds from contemporary EDM. Even the guitar in the chorus is much closer to Calvin Harris than anything else. While it’s not the oldest song on the record, this was the first one I made where it felt like I could make an entire project from this specific combination of ideas. Every song on this album is essentially about what happens when two people make a commitment to misunderstanding each other, but this one especially.
LIGHT FM
Lyrically, I have a lot of songs about driving, turn signals, highways, freeways, and radio stations. Living in Los Angeles, you spend a lot of time in your car, and because the nature of my job means I’m working with others most of the time, driving is often the only part of the day I spend by myself. I work through a lot of stuff in those moments, and the lyrics for this song were mostly written in my head on the freeway, beginning in Melbourne and ending in LA. The chord progression feels very shoegaze to me, but I wanted to pair those chords with the kind of breaks and Reese basses you’d typically hear in drum ’n’ bass. The bridge also almost has this stomp-clap thing going on. Whenever there’s an artistic motif that becomes universally derided, (in this case, stomp-clap-hey music) that’s usually the thing I’m most interested in exploring.
WHEREVER YOU GO, THERE YOU WERE
This is actually the oldest song on the record. It’s very influenced by the kind of confessional storytelling over breakbeats that was happening in the 2000s and early 2010s, with The Postal Service being the obvious reference, but then also, like, Sarah McLachlan. The bridge also has this twee group-vocal thing happening, which was just myself layered 16 times. Nina helped me finish the production on this one in my old studio in Melbourne. Thematically, I was interested in the idea of “pulling a geographic,” which is when you move to a new city or country with the hope of suddenly becoming a different person, only to be faced with the reality that you take yourself, your history, and your perception with you everywhere you go. It was also partially inspired by this meme:
WHEREVER YOU GO, THERE YOU WERE
I think this is the song where I dialled in the “Emotronica” thing the most. I mean, the opening guitar riff is borderline mid-2000s metalcore “clean bridge” territory, but then it gets layered with the type of synthesised FM guitar you’d hear on a song like “Toca’s Miracle.” Drawing parallels between two seemingly unrelated genres is the most exciting part of being a music producer to me, so I just took that concept and ran with it. One of the first times I shared this song, it was with Ginger and Farheen of MGNA Crrrta, who said, “Wait, you sound like Enrique Iglesias,” which I do not personally hear but can agree is a hilarious comparison.
ME IN MIAMI
When I was on tour with Daine and Curtis last year (I think we were in San Francisco) Curtis told me one of the craziest stories I’d ever heard and then followed it up with, “Anyway, that’s Me in Miami.” I had a sketch of the instrumental already laid out, so I saved the session on my laptop as “Me in Miami,” but I liked the way it sounded so much I never felt a need to change it. Nina was in LA on tour and we went to the studio to work on the idea. Initially I had a different chorus, until she suggested singing the synth melody that had previously been there. I love working with Nina because she always comes up with ideas I would never think to do on my own, and she really took the song to the place it ended up at.
GRAY NOTE
All my favourite emo records have interludes. My friend Julien, a very talented producer who goes by Veil, had sent me his January loops. I took one, re-pitched it, slowed it down, added reverb, reverse delay, etc. It became a perfect pause for the record, transitioning from the first half, which is very bright production wise, to the darker, slower second half.
YOU IN MARBELLA
Forever ☆ are a band I discovered randomly through an algorithmic deep dive when I was still in Melbourne. I reached out to ask if they’d want to make something together for an album I was working on, since we seemed to be on a very similar tip creatively: distorted guitars, breakbeats, Reese basses, octave doubled vocals, emotional melodies. Dave sent through the initial idea, I fleshed it out and added the bridge, and we collaborated on the vocal parts remotely.
WE TALK ABOUT MUSIC MOSTLY
Most of the close relationships I have in my life have begun from talking about music. There is nothing I love more than locking in on a music conversation. “Wait, where are they from?” “What year did that record come out?” “It’s so underrated that…” I was in Spain with two friends, all three of us working on different bits of music over the course of a week, and this is the song I left that trip with. I then took the demo to the studio in LA, and Casey (Lagos) helped me get it over the line.
“Visa”
Inspired by this tweet:
Another song where the hook had been sung over about 10 different instrumentals, but this ended up being the one where it stuck. I was listening to a lot of early Kaskade, and I became obsessed with that specific trance pluck sound you get in progressive dance music from that era. It starts to function like a percussive element at a certain point. I really just wanted to make a song about what it feels like to move to the other side of the world, and I knew I wanted my friend Max (Photographic Memory) to sing on it with me.
REVOLVER
This song definitely feels like an outlier compared to the rest of the record. There are no saw wave synths, it’s mostly guitars, and it feels much more dynamic and lived in. One of the most criminally underrated records of the 21st century is Jam City’s Dream a Garden. I was looking for that feeling of guitar music that feels like club music, which that record definitely has. I worked on this with my friend Edvard at his studio in North Melbourne, where we tried a lot of different pedals and guitars to get that wall-of-sound feeling while still having clarity in the vocals. That last little moment that closes out the album was also just an improvised thing. I’m not even fully sure what I’m saying, but it sounds like, “It fell apart again… convalescence… it fell apart again,” which felt like a good way to end the record.
Emotronica is out now.
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