Ever since their 2012 debut, Django Django have banked their popularity on their ability to mash as many genres as possible into one dense, heady sound. At their best, they sound like wide-eyed kids toying gleefully with an impressive arsenal of influences, ranging from ’60s psych to ’70s space rock, ’80s pop and ’90s indie, often within the same track. While this stylistic dexterity helped break them into the competitive independent UK scene of the early 2010s, it failed them on their overthought second record, 2015’s Born Under Saturn, where entire songs got lost in a fog of moody synths and splashy hi-hats.
On the band’s third album, Marble Skies, all the typical elements of their music are front-and-center: the noodly vintage synthesizers, the bouncy disco basslines, frontman Vincent Neff’s falsetto. But where much of Saturn got buried under the weight of its own grandeur, here Django turn the dial ever so gingerly back towards the sound that, at one point, made them Mercury Prize-nominated electro-psych-rock children of tomorrow. At the same time, you can hear them striving for the evolutionary jump that eludes so many indie bands on their third records—trying to concoct something fresh and exciting without losing the momentum they’ve built thus far. While Marble Skies doesn’t always quite get there, the planets it frantically orbits while awaiting touchdown are worth the journey.
Take the album’s title track. As straightforwardly enjoyable as anything Django has ever released, “Marble Skies” is a galloping, chugging pop song that positions the LP as not only spacey but fun—a quality that Django sometimes sacrifice in the name of intellectualism. It’s an explosion of vocoders, sing-along choruses, post-punk bass and harpsichord-styled keys straight out of “The Safety Dance.” The mixed-up sound is pure Django, but the commitment to good times feels new.
They continue to take risks with “Surface to Air,” a vocal collaboration with Rebecca Taylor of the British folk duo Slow Club. Her smooth contralto, overlaid with a crackly sheen of reverb, recalls vintage Marianne Faithfull, while strange flourishes in the production, like a snare drum that sounds almost exactly like an asthmatic cough, give the track an out-of-time feel. The most memorable element of the song, though, is its dancehall-influenced melodies and percussion, which fit perfectly with the post-Rihanna tropical pop that has been dominating the charts for the better part of this decade.
Elsewhere, Django Django battle their inclination for wink-nudge nerdism (there’s a slow, heavy track called “Beam Me Up,” which, we get it). And “Further,” which is supposed to be a country-tinged, desert-rock stomper, instead drones away without really anchoring to any one idea that Django haven’t explored many times before. “Tic Tac Toe” makes much better use of the band’s propensity for throwback sounds, taking sunbleached ’60s harmonies and punching them up with layered blasts of prog-rock.
If the best songs on this album propose the idea of Django as pop stars, “In Your Beat” blows it into the stratosphere. The most realized song that the group has released since its debut, it’s a huge-sounding dance-rock groove that would have been an international hit had it been released in 2007. That sounds like a dig, but it’s really a testament to how well Django evoke the now-distant time when the intersection of indie and dance was at its strongest. Here in the present, Marbles Skies suggests that they still have either a great pop record or a mind-bending rock opus in them, if they ever feel like going all the way.
