Many electronic producers double as DJs, and most DJs also produce, but Dan Snaith is more versatile than most. Since 2001, the music he makes as Caribou has set a high standard for melodic, propulsive, sonically adventurous indie dance. Then there's Caribou the live act, which expands Snaith's studio material for a full band-not just interpreting the songs, but radically transforming them. Finally, Snaith moonlights as Daphni, turning out sleek funk and disco edits for his famously wide-ranging DJ sets.
The sweep of Snaith's output, spanning home-listening faves and underground club heaters alike, makes him a fitting figure to spotlight as Spotify relaunches its Altar playlist. Dedicated to alternative electronic music and club culture -spanning house, bass, techno, downtempo, and just about every conceivable permutation thereof-Altar reflects the kinds of sounds that Snaith spent nearly 20 years pioneering.
This February, Snaith will release Suddenly, the first new Caribou album in more than five years. The first single, Home, dropped in October, and the second single, You and I, earlier this month. When For the Record reached Dan Snaith at his studio in London, he was working on preparations for the band's upcoming tour. It's all starting to become real, he said. It's been so long that I'm just so excited to get it going again.
We spoke with Snaith about his creative process, his upcoming album, and the state of electronic music right now.
Home, the first single from the forthcoming Caribou album, almost sounds like it could be a Daphni song. How do those two projects inform each other? There are definitely some Caribou tracks that almost could have been Daphni tracks, like Bowls on Swim or Mars on Our Love. It's kind of magnetic: Sometimes there's an attraction; sometimes it's the opposite. After the Daphni album in 2017 was when I really started making this new Caribou record in earnest. It was like, okay, now I can have more all-encompassing tracks that explore harmony or lyrics, whereas Daphni is specifically about making music that's club-focused. Home kind of sits apart from a lot of the other stuff on the record, actually. There are things that are reminiscent of Daphni, but I think there's a lot that's quite far away from that world as well.
With Caribou, are you gathering pieces of songs before you actually sit down to make the album in earnest, or are you starting from scratch? I'm gathering pieces all the time. I'll have a verse for a year and then eventually I come up with a chorus, or some switch gets flipped and another piece of the song comes together. There are some loops on the new record that existed even before Our Love was finished. I sit down in the studio every day and I make four or five 30-second-long loops, little ideas. So if you think about how long I've been making this record, now I've got a playlist with 900 ideas in it. Then it's this editing process, funneling things down over a long period of time, to get minutes of music out of hours and hours and hours of stuff. Which sounds torturous, and sometimes it is, but that's the thing that I most enjoy, starting from nothing and making some kind of idea.
Let's talk about the state of electronic music. What sounds are you particularly excited about right now? When I started in the early 2000s, the idea of somebody in experimental electronic music working on a Timbaland or a Neptunes record seemed totally absurd. Currently, there's a much closer connection between experimental electronic music and the mainstream. It's kind of hard to draw a boundary anymore. Now everything is electronic music, in a technical sense. Everybody's recording on the same tools, whether you're making a Taylor Swift record or a Skee Mask record.
That said, there have been times when I felt like I understood where the momentum in the electronic music world was. In 2008, 2009, living in London, meeting people like Floating Points, Joy Orbison, the Hessle Audio guys, it was like, wow, there's something really exciting and focused happening. It was easy to feed off that energy. Now, it doesn't feel like there's a central narrative, but what's exciting about what's happening is that there are many more diverse voices in electronic music than there used to be 10 or 15 years ago.
It's been a while since any significant new genres have emerged. Do you sense anything new on the horizon? When I was in high school, I heard jungle for the first time, and I couldn't even wrap my head around it. I haven't had that shock-of-the-new feeling for a long time. I hear individual producers with new ideas, but not something so completely new as a genre that it allows for a whole world to jump out of it. Presumably that will happen again.
It sometimes seems like there's so much electronic music out there now that there isn't the chance for consensus to build. I feel like people are waiting for it. Everybody is talking about what a big tune that Overmono track Le Tigre is. Now that the Caribou album is done, I'm excited to get out there and be playing, but I'm also sneakily going to start thinking about making club music again, because I'll be out there doing shows, maybe I'll play at the occasional after-party. It's moments like that that get me geared up like, Okay, I gotta make something that, like, bangs in a club.
You've been around since the days of actual physical crate-digging in record stores, and a lot of the music you make as Daphni is rooted in sampling rarities. How has streaming changed the way you discover music? I think I've learned about more new and exciting music digitally than I did when I was mostly digging through dusty piles of records, althou
Most recent headlines
05/01/2027
Worlds first 802.15.4ab-UWB chip verified by Calterah and Rohde & Schwarz to be ...
04/08/2026
Dalet, a leading technology and service provider for media-rich organizations, t...
04/07/2026
April 7 2026, 19:00 (PDT) Detective Conan: Fallen Angel of the Highway Opens in...
02/06/2026
Studio Technologies, a leading manufacturer of high-quality audio, video, and fiber-optic solutions, announces its new Model 385 Mic/Intercom Beltpack. The Mode...
02/06/2026
The Riedel Group today announced the appointment of Gudrun Scharler as CEO of Riedel Networks. She succeeds Michael Martens, who has led Riedel Networks since 2...
02/06/2026
More signals, higher quality, and outstanding ingest and streaming flexibility deliver professional results in a small, all-in-one footprint...
02/06/2026
farmerswife will be featured on the Modena Media & Entertainment stand at this year's Mediatech Africa 2026, giving visitors an opportunity to explore the l...
02/06/2026
PTZOptics will showcase a new generation of intelligent video workflows at InfoComm 2026, June 17 19, Las Vegas. Visitors to booth N8227 will see how PTZOptics ...
02/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
02/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
02/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
02/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
01/06/2026
In its sixth year, the broadcaster's coverage has become a global brand and ...
01/06/2026
Designed to solve a common problem in broadcasting, the automated workflow detects, identifies, removes, and documents copyrighted music
AudioShake has introdu...
01/06/2026
The sports-analytics company combines its data with proprietary AI to help leagu...
01/06/2026
Category line-up & sponsors announced
Photo: Paul Clarke
The Production Music Awards (PMA) have announced that submissions are now officially open ahead of...
01/06/2026
New hybrid sample/synthesis instrument revealed
Excite Audio have just released the latest instalment in their Evolve series, which has been developed in co...
01/06/2026
Latest TONEX expansion captures three rare vintage amps
The newest addition to IK Multimedia's ever-growing TONEX line-up introduces a set of three incr...
01/06/2026
Musically intelligent soft synth gets upgraded
Scaler Music will be probably be best known to many for their music theory tools, but their product range al...
01/06/2026
SBS confirms its broadcast sponsors for FIFA World Cup 2026
1 June, 2026
Media releases
SBS has secured Hyundai, Hisense, Macca's, Rexona, bet365, Com...
01/06/2026
Rohde & Schwarz Satellite Industry Days 2026 guided by the motto From Earth to ...
01/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
01/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
01/06/2026
Marshall Electronics is showcasing a comprehensive lineup of next-generation POV cameras, purpose-built to power today's connected AV environments, at InfoC...
01/06/2026
Adobe Announces Concept to Vector
Deepa Subramaniam June 1, 2026
0 Comments
One of the biggest frustrations we hear from designers is how difficult it...
01/06/2026
Vampire Feature Night Patrol Graded with DaVinci Resolve Studio
Brie Clayton June 1, 2026
0 Comments
Colorist shapes dark, gritty tone for horror thri...
01/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
01/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
01/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
01/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
01/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
01/06/2026
Luxembourg, June 1, 2026 - SES, a leading space solutions company, and Viva, Mexico's ultra low-cost airline, launched fast and reliable multi-orbit satelli...
01/06/2026
Agentic AI is getting physical.
At COMPUTEX on Tuesday, NVIDIA announced NVIDIA JetPack 7.2 and NVIDIA NemoClaw support on NVIDIA Jetson.
JetPack 7.2 brings a...
01/06/2026
Financial institutions have spent years building AI: fraud models, credit models...
01/06/2026
Mardi 2 juin 14h00
FilmLight (ARRI), 10 rue Ren Boulanger, 75010 Paris
Rejoignez-nous pour d couvrir comment FLAPI (l'API FilmLight) peut transformer e...
01/06/2026
January 6 2026, 05:30 (PST) Dolby Sets the New Standard for Premium Entertainment at CES 2026
Throughout the week, Dolby brings to life the latest innovatio...
31/05/2026
Olivia P rez-Collellmir to Premiere Original Work at Gaud Centennial in Barcelona The Berklee graduate and faculty member will debut her choral symphony with...
31/05/2026
Back to All News
Netflix Wins 15 Awards at the Canadian Screen Awards - See Pho...
31/05/2026
Taiwan is home to more than 500 NVIDIA ecosystem partners. More than 1 million N...
31/05/2026
As factories move from isolated automation to plant-wide intelligence, manufacturers need AI systems that can connect live machine signals, quality systems, wor...
31/05/2026
The NVIDIA AI Cloud ecosystem is accelerating the global buildout of AI factory infrastructure. Partners are expanding capacity to meet growing demand from ente...
30/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
30/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
30/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
30/05/2026
Zero in on one that says yes (and no)
Andy Marken May 29, 2026
0 Comments
Hero image courtesy of Deposit Photos
For content creators the most difficu...
29/05/2026
With InfoComm 2026 just weeks away, NDI is giving attendees plenty of reasons to...
29/05/2026
Reaffirming a partnership that has defined Canadian sports broadcasting since 19...
29/05/2026
Mobile/tablet is No. 2 device for watching TV, suggesting that the sports-production industry needs to take another look at the format
Ring Digital's Sprin...
29/05/2026
Berliner Ensemble, one of Berlin's five major theater companies, has expande...
Many electronic producers double as DJs, and most DJs also produce, but Dan Snaith is more versatile than most. Since 2001, the music he makes as Caribou has set a high standard for melodic, propulsive, sonically adventurous indie dance. Then there's Caribou the live act, which expands Snaith's studio material for a full band-not just interpreting the songs, but radically transforming them. Finally, Snaith moonlights as Daphni, turning out sleek funk and disco edits for his famously wide-ranging DJ sets.
