“I wanted to record Yoko Ono,” Basement Jaxx‘s Felix Burton notes in a recent interview with Billboard.com. “That was the reason we went out there [to New York], and then Yo! Majesty and Santigold fell into place along with that.”
And that’s only the beginning.
For its fifth studio album, titled Scars and due for release in October via XL Recordings, the electro duo of Burton and Simon Ratcliffe, known to me and you as Basement Jaxx went exploring, choosing to abadon its London studios in favor of Berlin and the Big Apple. Along the way, they picked up the aforementioned guests as well as Eli “Paperboy” Reed, Sam Sparro, Paloma Faith, Lightspeed Champion and Amp Fiddler before ultimately creating a studio album described as “noisy,” “shuttering” and “funkified.”
An early preview, in the form of the auto-tune’d first single, “Raindrops”, was recently released and is currently available at all your favorite music outlets.
Basement Jaxx plan will support the release with a string of already announced U.K. festival appearances. A U.S. leg depends on the U.S., says Buxton. “If people like the music and really get into it, then we’ll probably come,” he says. “If they don’t, we won’t.”
Another release, described as “Pink Floyd-y, more ambient-y stuff,” is also said to be in the works.
