Junior Boys – So This Is Goodbye

No Junior Boys, no Two Dancers. They’re not on Domino anymore but they were at the time, and I actually discovered them because [Domino founder] Laurence Bell gave us the record and said ‘I think you boys will like this’ – and it was like, ‘Yeah, okay, we’ll listen to that and make you another record that sounds a bit like it.’ This one in particular has lots of sad, sexy songs, and it was a way into the synthetic thing for me, because I’d come from a background of playing instruments and didn’t know one end of a computer from another, but I got this. It’s got all the austerity of techno, in the service of these very sexy love songs written by two awkward guys from Canada. We met them and they were lovely – they knew we were huge fans – and they kindly did a remix for us.

Their lyrics resonated with me. It didn’t feel like an energetic record, but like a sad one, as if you’re dancing despite the sadness, and there’s this late-night bed-hopping despair to it which is fucking awesome. It’s sexy and there’s a consistent melancholy that gets to you, but also with lots of big hooks and great choruses. They should have been massive; they should be massive. I would say they were one of our greatest shared influences, and led us down an avenue away from [Wild Beasts’ debut] Limbo, Panto, that scattergun indie thing, into something sleeker.