Dan Snaith is still best-known as the man behind Caribou, a project that’s been through many incarnations over the decades. For much of that time, Snaith has also made straight-up dance music under the name Daphni. But there isn’t really an obvious division between those two projects. Last year, Snaith released Honey, a Caribou album that sounded a lot like Daphni. Next year, Snaith will release the new Daphni album Butterfly, and the single that he just shared sounds at least a bit like Caribou.
For the past few months, Dan Snaith has been releasing a steady string of Daphni singles — tracks like “Sad Piano House,” “Eleven,” and “Josephine.” Those tracks will all appear on Butterfly, the follow-up to the 2022 Daphni album Cherry. So will “Waiting So Long,” a driving, celebratory single with a serious hit of French Touch filter-disco. Snaith gives himself the house-diva vocal on this one, and the mere presence of his melancholy falsetto makes it sound closer to Caribou than Snaith usually gets with his Daphi music. It’s actually the first song that has ever featured Snaith’s vocal, and there’s a “feat. Caribou” credit on it, which is funny, like when Madlib would collaborate with Quasimoto. Here’s what Snaith says about it:
People understandably always ask about the difference between Caribou and Daphni music — how I decide which is which. I think there have been times where the music I’ve made under the two aliases has been farther apart and times — e.g. right now — where they’re closer together. One big thing that has always differentiated them is my voice. I’ve never sung on a Daphni track. When I started “Waiting So Long” initially, it was an instrumental. The lyric and the melody came to me as I was working on it and I just recorded it without thinking too much about it, but when I listened back to it a few days later it was the first time that I’ve had the sense that a track belonged to both aliases — like Daphni had sampled a Caribou vocal or something like that. I’m not in the midst of some existential crisis; I haven’t, hopefully, slipped too deep into the welcoming waters of the pool of Narcissus; I don’t agonise about what track ends up under what alias — in fact the opposite. I worry about it less than ever and just go with my gut instinct. On a practical level I just felt like this was a track that both Daphni and Caribou fans might want to hear.
Below, check out the Damien Roach-directed “Waiting So Long” video and the Butterfly tracklist.
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TRACKLIST:
01 “Sad Piano House”
02 “Clap Your Hands”
03 “Hang”
04 “Lucky”
05 “Waiting So Long”
06 “Napoleon’s Rock”
07 “Good Night Baby”
08 “Talk To Me”
09 “Two Maps”
10 “Josephine”
11 “Miles Smiths”
12 “Goldie”
13 “Caterpillar”
14 “Shifty”
15 “Invention”
16 “Eleven”
Butterfly is out 2/6 on Jiaolong.
