Butterfly

Music fans of a certain vintage will never forget the first time they heard "Ye Ye," one of the first singles Dan Snaith released under the alias Daphni. A sweaty and propulsive slice of deep house built around a shuffling beat and a sinister bass line, the track was strange and transfixing; unremitting, it swells and heaves forth like a molten mass of lava.The centrepiece of Daphni's 2012 debut album Jiaolong, "Ye Ye" signalled a new direction for Snaith. Unlike his work as Caribou — the popular electronic-pyschedelia project that had by this point become a mainstay on the festival circuit — Daphni was a purer expression of dance music.For those of us who grew up listening to Caribou, it was a thrilling, and unlikely pivot for a darling of the indie scene — proof that even a straight edge guy from Dundas, ON, with a PhD in mathematics could craft the soundtrack for dim-lit clubs and all-night raves.Nearly a decade and a half later, Daphni has evolved from a side project to an essential part of Snaith's musical identity. Since Jiaolong, Daphni has released a steady drip of albums and DJ mixes of consistently excellent quality: music that's propulsive enough to ignite a dancefloor, but brainy and unpredictable enough to delight those of us who are too awkward to step foot in the club.At the same time, the once-obvious barrier that divided Caribou (the experimental, pop-oriented project/live act) and Daphni (the dance purist/DJ) has in recent years become far more porous. Indeed, following the phenomenal 2019 LP Suddenly — surely Snaith's most personal and pop-oriented album — Caribou's pandemic era output has been faster, dancier and stripped of nearly all its analogue features; on 2024's Honey, Snaith even made the controversial decision to manipulate his vocals using artificial intelligence.This sonic convergence reached its apotheosis last fall with the release of "Waiting So Long," a Daphni single that features, for the very first time, vocals from Snaith himself. And it's a triumph: a no-frills house track anchored by four simple piano chords and a blend of live and electronic percussion, and buoyed by Snaith's distinctly fragile and warbly singing voice, trembling with a feel-good sense of yearning. Euphoric and brimming with emotion, "Waiting So Long" contains the heart of a Caribou song and the pulse of Daphni track.So, has the line between Caribou and Daphni finally collapsed?Butterfly, the first new Daphni album in four years, suggests no, not exactly. Sprawling and delightfully eccentric, the double LP is very much a dance record, though one that's adorned with splashes of colour and experimental detours that feel distinctly Caribou-esque. In other words, the divide remains, but the centre portion of the Venn diagram has widened.Take, for example, the opening track, "Sad Piano House," which combines an off-kilter piano loop that would have felt at home on Suddenly with a massive house beat. Or the melancholy synth line and vocal sample of "Good Night Baby," an album standout that packs an emotional heft rarely heard on a Daphni record. This centaur-like quality also animates the album's epic closer, "Eleven," which contains a slow-burn crescendo faintly reminiscent of Caribou's set-closing classic "Can't Do Without You."For the majority of Butterfly, however, Snaith sticks to the classic Daphni formula, constructing high-octane dance tracks around odd, sharp-edged samples — e.g., the micro-horn blasts on "Lucky," or the abrasive electronic squiggles on "Goldie."Daphni also has a knack for pushing songs to their very limits, stacking sounds at unwieldy angles like a Jenga tower teetering on the edge of collapse. The kinetic "Clap Your Hands" spends three minutes charging forward before the ceiling opens up to a torrent of horror-movie strings. Then there's "Two Maps," a bizarre, dizzying amalgamation of atonal loops that really shouldn't work, but somehow sucks you in.At 16 tracks, the album can feel a bit bloated or unfocused at times, and contains a couple of duds — despite featuring a wickey dubby bass line, "Talk to Me" never really takes off, while "Josephine" suffers from a similar lack of coherence.And yet it never feels like a slog, Snaith keeping listeners on their toes with a series of what we might call interludes: deliciously idiosyncratic experiments and bits of ear candy that bubble up and then quickly disappear. There's the trippy jazz-fusion of "Napoleon's Rock," which clocks in at less than a minute, and the steel-drum shuffle of "Miles Smiles." The penultimate track, "Invention," is perhaps the strangest on the album — an anachronistic marriage of harpsichord and lamellophone that would fit nicely on a mid-career Aphex Twin project.  These interludes provide the album with an earthy and analogue quality, which feels particularly refreshing for those of us who were turned off (or even felt betrayed) by Snaith's recent embrace of AI.Taken together, Butterfly feels less like a fusion of Daphni and Caribou, and more like an uninhibited manifestation of Snaith's ever-changing tastes and proclivities. "The album is wild," he wrote on Instagram in the fall. "I just forgot to think about [what] the album was supposed to be and made whatever struck me."Maybe that's what it's all about.