About two weeks ago, the dance music community was blessed with a rarity in our scene, a full length album from one of the most influential and talented groups in electronic music. Canadian duo and EDMSauce man crushes Adventure Club released their debut album titled “Red // Blue” featuring ten songs that ranged from powerful vocal based originals as they began their career with, to ballads of pure emotion, to more high energy progressive bangers. The project has been in the works for the duo for quite some time now, and earlier today we had the chance to catch up with them about it's release. We wanted to know all about the album itself, as well as the process of making it and how that has impacted Christian and Leighton as individuals and as a duo. Take a look at what they had to say below, and make sure to look for the streaming version of the album at the bottom of the page. You can also purchase the album here.
How does it feel to be putting out your debut album?
Leighton: It’s been a long time coming, its incredibly rewarding. It’s really nice to have a body of work out there that encompasses how we have felt over the last four years of making music. Not to say this sounding bad, but it’s a real relief for us to showcase this to the world.
What does the album title “Red // Blue” mean to you guys? Is there some sort of hidden meaning behind it?
Christian: There definitely is. There’s kind of that superficial level where as far as our branding goes, from the get go we always had that superhero theme and the red and blue came to be apart of that, especially with all the imaging that has gone along with us these years. When it came down to making all the tracks for the album, as we came towards the end of it we realized there was a significant difference between some of the songs, some being more aggressive and more energy directed and some on the other side of the spectrum that were more emotional and relaxing, not as high energy and more deep. With most of them we felt that, with colors relating to sounds and motions, that there was definitely a color connection between most of those songs, the red being the more intense energetic tracks and the emotional tracks siding with blue. We started contextualizing our work on this in that way, and it really came together quickly and helped us to finalize the album and finish off the last few tracks.
Are there any specific experiences or people in your lives that these songs were written for/about?
Leighton: All of them yeah! We’ve written some of the songs about personal experiences and there are a few songs that are directly related to movies or Books we’ve experienced. As far as specificity though, there isn’t any one song that is directed towards one person.
Christian: Yeah I mean we carry along with us all of our experiences and that seems to always radiate into our music. I feel like it would be almost impossible to write music without pulling from all of the emotions and experiences you’ve had in your life. There wasn’t a very specific situation, as Leighton said, that I was pulling from when writing some of these songs, but there definitely is a more generalized personal aspect to a lot of the tracks on the album where there were areas of my life I wanted to explore through the process of writing music.
Many of your fans have watched you develop as artists over the course of your careers, and while some say that your original sound is different than the one presently, we see the classic Adventure Club sound in all your releases so far. Will this album continue the legacy of the sound you have close to perfected or will we see some new and more experimental sounds involved in this album for you guys?
Leighton: There’s a lot of, and more than I maybe realized in the process of writing it, classic Adventure Club sounds in the tracks on this album. I noticed it mainly during the last few listens of the album before we released it. It was definitely more than I expected, and naturally it makes sense as it is our natural writing style so it’s going to be there in whatever process we are focused on together. We definitely did experiment a lot however, since we had the time and space to get into areas that we wanted to get into and haven’t had the time to do that before. We didn’t want to half ass these new experiments and wanted to put our all into them.
Christian: With this full length piece we really had the chance to showcase what we wanted to and weren’t limited by a single release or a smaller EP project.
When it comes to this album, we saw that there are originals but also some collaborative efforts with other artists as well, what was it like to work with those artists and do you prefer to work on your own or with others involved?
Christian: Basically every track, minus the one that I sung on, had some form of collaborative process. There’s no song on the album that didn’t have a vocal in it, and we also worked with other producers on tracks such as ‘Without You' or ‘Save Me'. I think it’s an amazing experience to explore the sounds of another within our industry and its a special part of this scene that helps it develop, move, and shift in a way that other scenes do not have the chance to. When everyone comes together and brings what they can to the table, it means that everyone isn’t out in the open against each other. Exploring the scene we are in with other artists is extremely rewarding and there will always be a take home, you’ll always have some kind of experience that you might not have looked at the same way. It’s been a ton of fun.
Did fans get the chance to hear some of the songs on the album at your live shows in the last few months or have you been saving a lot of these tunes for the release?
Leighton: We’ve been completely saving almost all of the music for this release.
Looking back on what you two have accomplished, how does it feel to be accomplishing another major feat? Is this one more special to you guys than others have been? Is this only the beginning for Adventure Club when it comes to album work?
Leighton: It feels more like a starting point for us, it really took things to a new level. We had the chance to build a studio in Montreal over the process of making the album and everything just started moving a little differently this year. We really started taking our music seriously in a different way than we had before. For us, this is a new connection and a new chapter and we are in the very early stages of that chapter. It’s all very exciting.
