Dan Snaith has announced a new album under his Daphni alias.
Following on from 2022’s Cherry, the 16-track Butterfly features the single ‘Sad Piano House’, which Snaith released in June. He’s also shared two new songs from the album to coincide with its announcement, ‘Lucky’ and ‘Waiting So Long’, the latter of which credits his alternative Caribou alias as a featured artist.
“People understandably always ask about the difference between Caribou and Daphni music – how I decide which is which,” Snaith said of why Caribou is credited on ‘Waiting So Long’. “I think there have been times where the music I’ve made under the two aliases has been farther apart and times – eg, right now – where they’re closer together. One big thing that has always differentiated them is my voice. I’ve never sung on a Daphni track.
“When I started ‘Waiting So Long’, initially it was an instrumental. The lyric and the melody came to me as I was working on it and I just recorded it without thinking too much about it, but when I listened back to it a few days later it was the first time that I’ve had the sense that a track belonged to both aliases – like Daphni had sampled a Caribou vocal or something like that. I’m not in the midst of some existential crisis; I haven’t, hopefully, slipped too deep into the welcoming waters of the pool of Narcissus; I don’t agonise about what track ends up under what alias – in fact the opposite. I worry about it less than ever and just go with my gut instinct. On a practical level, I just felt like this was a track that both Daphni and Caribou fans might want to hear.”
Snaith also credited a DJ set he played at the vaunted club Open Ground in Wuppertal as a significant influence on Butterfly. “It’s kind of, in one sense, the platonic ideal of the kind of club I’d want to play in,” he said. “Every single decision has been taken, at great expense, with the aim of making the perfect-sounding medium-sized club room. It is an absolute pleasure to play in that room to a crowd of people who come from all over. Playing in there you feel like you can play anything, and I played works in progress of pretty much every track on this album in my set there.”
Listen to ‘Waiting So Long’ and ‘Lucky’ below.
Jiaolong will release Butterfly on February 6, 2026.
