Top image: Deap Vally / photography by Kelsey Hart

Sick of being asked “Will you ever add a third member?” LA duo Deap Vally went bigger – why stop at three? As a dynamic two-piece, the traditional limitations are their line-up are clear (not that these two play by those rules), so for their latest EP, Digital Dream, Lindsey Troy and Julie Edwards dipped into their contacts book for a number of high-calibre collaborations to join in and shake things up.

Keen for some “organic, majority-rules creative process,” the resulting EP features four tracks with four stellar collaborations: Warpaint’s jennylee (Warpaint), Soko, Jamie Hince (The Kills), and KT Tunstall and Peaches. Throwing just about everything in the blender and seeing what sticks, the work is a triumph of sonic liberation, aligning grooves through a “musical free-for-all where anything goes.” Recorded in different studios across the world and with different routines and ambience, each track takes its own stretch of road – from the melodic dreamscape of Look Away to the pulsing, dub beat of Shock Easy – on this hitchhiking, collaborative journey.

Keen for more, below Deap Vally and their Digital Dream collaborations talk us through how they met and how their respective tracks were born.

Look Away ft jennylee
jennylee: “Working with the ladies of Deap Vally was such a lovely experience of diving into the unknown and coming out with treasure! We had no expectations other than to have fun and enjoy playing music with friends.”

Deap Vally: “It was such a satisfying adventure to discover this song in the studio with jennylee. It just came together sort of magically and effortlessly, and the creative process was very relaxed, like the song!”

High Horse ft KT Tunstall and Peaches

KT Tunstall: “This was a dream collab for me. As musicians who, before the pandemic, were constantly on the road, it was a rare pleasure to find the opportunity to hang out in Dave Grohl’s beautiful studio with these rad talented women and make whatever we wanted.”

Peaches: “We had a blast making this and you can hear that fun come through on the track!”

Deap Vally: “Working with KT and Peaches was a total pleasure.  All good vibes, great humor, and straight-up badassery.”

Digital Dream ft Soko

Soko: “The idea was to talk about how technology can bring us together but also how isolating it can make things – and the disconnect it creates with reality and real emotions. How we miss real human interactions.”

Deap Vally: “Soko is such a brilliant visionary artist and has mind-blowingly great instincts and ideas. We learned A LOT from writing and producing with her.”

Shock Easy ft Jamie Hince

Jamie Hince: “I had this twenty second guitar part knocking around for ages, with a little top melody. I always thought of it as a cool little intro but I could never manage to develop it any further than that. It’s weird when you play stuff to other people and you see them getting really excited about a piece of music that you’ve just about given up on. Like I remember Lindsey and Julie just wanting to jump in and finish it as soon as they heard it. That was really inspiring, having this chaos of ideas coming out quicker than you could record them.

Then when I got the tracks back to my studio and listened through everything again it was like unwrapping a secret, there were these little gems I’d barely noticed during the recording, like Julie’s gospel parts and the weird atmospheric guitar in the background, and then glueing it all together with that subby dub bass. I loved that, finding some kind of order in all those accidents and chaos.”

Deap Vally: “Probably our favorite part about making this song was hanging at Jamie’s house – it’s always so interesting to see how other people live and work in home studios; break for a cup of tea, and enjoy the ambience.  Jamie is a gentleman and so humble.  Plus every time he picks up a guitar he makes magic. It’s inspiring.”

Deap Vally’s Digital Dream EP is out 26th February via Cooking Vinyl.
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