Unfold

At nine tracks, Unfold is the largest body of work yet from Bristol’s Icarus. But don’t be tempted to call it an album. “We’re just calling it a project,” says Tom Griffiths, one half of the sibling pairing. “It was initially meant to be just a six-track EP, but it grew to be something more expansive and just felt right at nine tracks.” Along with his brother Ian, the duo has become known for making shimmering electronic music since 2013’s Steal the Sun, with key touchstones including deep and progressive house and their knack for a highly infectious melody. “I do think duos tend to have similar personalities,” says Tom of the brothers’ working partnership. “We’ll work on ideas separately at home sometimes and then bring them to each other in the studio, but left to our own devices I think we’d both really struggle to finish anything.” Fortunately, Unfold arrives complete and quite beautiful. The project moves from its ethereal opener and title track through to the driving “Meet Me There” and the glorious ambience of “Swim”—while maintaining an overriding sense of optimism. “This project not only marks the closing of a period of time but signifies a fresh, new, and exciting one,” says Tom. “These songs represent how our lives, personalities, and ever-changing selves unfold.”

Unfold (feat. Tim Digby-Bell)
“We met Tim from [Dutch house and techno band] Cubicolor when we were both supporting RÜFÜS DU SOL on tour in America. There’s something about being on tour that makes you forge friendships that are different to others because you spend so much time together, and we just got on straight away. We then got together in our studio towards the end of last summer and we wrote this track in that session straight away. His vocals just complement this track so well.”

Fade Away
“We approached a few tracks on this project wanting them to be more club-focused, and this was definitely one of them. Ian was just messing around using some repeaters, and all those melodies just started layering up. It’s got quite a big bottom end to it and very subtle vocal ideas which kind of come across as samples. We’ve been playing it out and it’s definitely got the reaction we wanted.”

Meet Me There (feat. Nathan Ball)
“This was the first track written for this project. We got put together with Nathan through a mutual friend, and when we heard his voice we could just tell his tone would work well with dance music. We had a few ideas and asked Nathan to improvise vocals and ideas over it. It’s a cliché, but that was one of the most organic writing experiences we’ve had. Ian was stripping bits out of it and then Bluetoothing it over to me on the laptop and Nathan was like, ‘OK, I’ve got something,’ and we just set up the microphone and let him go.”

Joy
“This is actually my favorite track. It began quite differently, almost like a garage track with a bleepy top line and a percussion loop, but I used the pattern of the percussion loop to form a melody. I started this on my laptop and then took it into the studio and plugged in our Moog Voyager, and that got us much more onto the path we wanted to go with it.”

Swim
“We knew we wanted to do a couple of interludes, and this is the shortest one. It’s stripped back and kind of melancholic but sort of sinister too and gives the listener a bit of breathing space. We’ve always like the idea of doing interludes as they can put the listener in a different headspace, but they never made sense to do when we were putting out projects with just five or six tracks.”

Between Us
“With this we just wanted something a bit rolling and progressive that you can go on a bit of a journey with. It’s another that can work in a club environment, and we wanted to make something an instrumental. We kind of struggle with that sometimes, not relying on hooks or vocals. The drums are quite breaky and quite rough-edged, and this one just flowed quite easily.”

Dreams of You (feat. Rae Morris)
“Rae’s super talented, and we remixed her track ‘Do It’ a few years ago, and the track became really important to us and kind of took on a life of its own. We put it in our live show, and we always wanted to try and work on something else with her. We’ve tried to work on things over the years just on email and it’s never really worked, so we got together for a couple of days in London. We took her five ideas and she picked two to work on. ‘Dreams of You’ was the idea we ideally wanted to steer her towards, and luckily this was the one she picked out too. She has a classic club sound to her vocals. Her vocals are almost angelic, and we knew she’d sound great on a really big record.”

Rush
“We wanted this to be a bit more clubby and aggressive and have a bit of a nasty edge to it. We don’t usually do anything this hard, but it’s got a great energetic feeling. When we’ve sent tracks to friends or other people in music, they’ve always come back to this one. It’s got a great reaction when we’ve played it in clubs, too.”

Tomorrow
“This began as an interlude but has grown more into its own thing. Initially it had a drum track in it that kind of had a jungle flavor, but then we stripped the drum track out to just see what we had underneath and it sounded really great. We wanted to show people we could do something at a different tempo that people might not expect from us. It feels like a nice way to end the project with a little nod to what might come in the future.”