Jungle: “I spent three years trying to make another ‘Busy Earnin’”

To start work on Jungle’s fourth album ‘Volcano’, the band’s J Lloyd booked himself in at a Los Angeles AirBnB steeped in musical history. “Vince Staples did an NPR session in it once, and it’s this amazing house with an incredible view.

“I brought loads of studio gear in and the owner went absolutely mental,” the multi-instrumentalist and producer laughs. “He thought I was going to host a huge party, and I told him, ‘No, I’ve just got an acoustic guitar! I’m just a lonely writer!’”

In this month, the core of the London duo’s new album was laid down in a carefree and instinctive way, emblematic of Lloyd and Tom McFarland’s new approach to writing music. After trying to recapture the magic of their Mercury-nominated 2014 debut on self-described “painful” follow-up ‘For Ever’, the pair have settled into a more languid, less paranoid stride through 2021’s ‘Loving In Stereo’ and the imminent ‘Volcano’.

Here, Lloyd talks NME through these changes, working with Channel Tres and Roots Manuva and how SAULT producer Inflo taught him a new way of approaching creativity.

NME: Around the time of 2021 album ‘Loving In Stereo’, you told NME you’d moved on from a “painful” second LP and “stopped giving a fuck” – did that feeling continue here?

J Lloyd: “We’re trying to do the antithesis of what the second record was. Doing the second record was hard, and because it was four years between that and the first one, we almost had to start again. People were like, ‘Jungle? Who?’. Off the back of the first album, we thought we were invincible, but the hard reality then hit in. We were carrying our songs around on a hard drive and didn’t really know what to do with ourselves. You have to have a self-imposed deadline or nothing gets done.

“We were really lucky with COVID, to be honest. My heart goes out to everyone who had just released an album when it hit, but that was in our down period and we came straight out of that in September 2021, played four Brixton Academys and everyone was keen to be out and about again. After a year on the road, we went straight into the studio and kept going into this.”

And after you finished working at the AirBnB in Los Angeles, where was the rest of ‘Volcano’ written and recorded?

“We went on tour, and then at the end of 2022 we went into [London’s] Metropolis Studios for two months and gave ourselves that deadline to make the whole album. It’s the way people used to make records – you book in the time and spend the money, so you have to turn up. It gives you that emphasis and that push to make the most of it. You can always find ways to waste your time, but working in this way gave us a clear deadline, and it was a really good way to work.

Did the two of you have many collaborators in the room with you across those two months?

“[Collaborator] Lydia Kitto was with us, and she’s been involved since [2021 single] ‘Keep Moving’. She played in a psych band called Club Kuru who I heard on a Danger Mouse playlist and got them to support us in Europe. We were friends of friends for a bit, and then [Jungle drummer] George suggested that we do a session together. She’s an amazing singer and writer and it was an honour to work with her and we gel really well.

“We were building up samples, and The Avalanches have always been a massive inspiration to me in that way. It’s full of samples, but has this kind of hopeful, kind of nostalgia feeling. Because of how it’s been made, you also feel like you’re listening to three radio stations at the same time. With this album, we wanted to get back to what we are at the core. There isn’t much pretence in it. We had a bit more fun with it. We don’t care so much anymore about what it is, just that it’s fun.”

‘Volcano’ features more funk and soul elements than we’ve heard from Jungle so far – did you know from the start that this was a direction you wanted to go in?

“I think so. There’s always been a tendency since the second record to insist that Jungle is an upbeat thing. We tried to stop doing so many ballads and half-time tracks, because there’s other projects for that. People come to Jungle because they wanted to have a good time. It was this Chic and Daft Punk thing, somewhere between the two of them.”

How did the process of sampling work between you and Lydia, and what did it bring to the sound of ‘Volcano’?

“Jungle music has always started with beats and rhythms, but this album started with melodies and harmonies. We wanted to create the feeling of samples but we’d write the whole song. For ‘Candle Flame’, we wrote the song at 25bpm slower like an old soul track, and then reinterpreted it into the actual song. I was always inspired by records that were full of samples, like Madlib and J Dilla. You didn’t know what the samples were, but they had a real soul in there.

“We wanted to do something like that, but I thought, ‘How cool would it be if we didn’t just lift another record, but make the original record ourselves and then repurpose it?’ You write a song and then remix it. We would record the songs like old soul songs with just one vocal, and then place it into another existing song.”

The likes of Channel Tres and Erick The Architect also guest on the record – how did they fit into the process and why did you choose them?

“The Channel Tres vocal happened way before the conception of this album, and the Roots Manuva vocals were recorded during the second album [2018’s ‘For Ever’]. It’s about collecting moments with people and you don’t really know what they’re for yet. Radiohead do that – they’ll write a song and it’ll end up on a record 10 years later. I started to understand that process more, that it might not be right in the moment but will work later. The song that Channel Tres is now on, ‘I’ve Been In Love’, originally had me singing the verse, but it sounded too similar to an existing track, so we had to do a new verse, and I couldn’t get that first melody out of my head. I remembered we had the Channel Tres song in the same tempo and key, and it worked when we dropped it in. I sent it to him, and he said it was wicked.”

The album also features a conceptual set of music videos – can you tell us about the story behind these visuals?

“We contextualised it all and presented it as a mysterious TV show in which all these Jungle videos are being made. We are the meta stars of it. We’re following Will and Mette [recurring characters in Jungle music videos], and Will has been away for a whole album, and Mette was in this Shutter Island world going through a mental episode. We come back to them and they realise they’re in this TV show, and they’re different people now. Time’s gone on, and you’re yearning for them to still be together. We play on the on-air, off-air concept inspired by Birdman, and they’re completely different on- and off-stage. Jungle have been considered this show-y, jazz hands kind of group, and a bit cheesy at times. This is our explanation of that, doing something that has this feel-good element, but a deeper narrative layer questioning what’s actually going on beyond that.”

What did working in this way for the new album teach you?

“It actually goes back to something that Inflo and I found out when we made [2018 track] ‘Casio’. We had a mentality of booking in a week of work with no pressure of where it might lead, and then we wrote ‘Casio’ in 45 minutes and it was the birth of a whole new Jungle sound. Inflo’s a genius, and he told me he did a whole SAULT album in a week. He opened up a door for me of realising that none of this is that important – it’s all about the vibe and the flow. A song is normally there in two hours, and it doesn’t need to be more complicated than that. The essence of it is already there, and demos usually sound the best because you don’t overdo it. That’s why I mixed this whole record myself, because if you give it to someone else they can iron out all the things that are cool about it, even if they’re ‘wrong’. It’s so easy with laptops to keep tweaking, and by the time you’ve done a load of tweaks, you’ve lost the original energy. Anyway, I’m talking some hippy Rick Rubin shit!”

Do you think this way of working will define how Jungle operate and write music moving forwards?

“100 per cent. All creativity should be seen like that. You’re trying to limit the process of overthinking, and trying to not get in your own head about that. It’s a feeling, and it’s either working or it isn’t. It’s about trying not to game theory it. I tried to game theory making another ‘Busy Earnin’’ for three years, doing sirens and horns and everything. You’re never going to find that same feeling again. As human beings, we always want to go back and find that old feeling again, but you have to go towards the new way instead.”

Jungle’s ‘Volcano’ is released August 11 on Caiola/AWAL

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