“A lot of time was spent trying to make it perfect”: The Chemical Brothers on ‘Surrender’ 25 years later
The dance duo’s third album sold over 2.3million copies in the 25 years since it was released
Credit: Getty / Pablo Gallardo
The Chemical Brothers have looked back on their experience making their landmark album Surrender, 25 years on from its release.
Tom Rowlands, one half of the electronic music duo, spoke to DJ Mag about the quarter-century milestone of their third album, which arrived as dance music was exploding around the turn of the millennium.
“I sometimes think that the record you make is the reaction to the last one,” Rowlands says. “We’d really chased after something with ‘Dig Your Own Hole’, and we’d kind of got that. ‘Surrender’ was going to open things up to be a more collaborative work. When we started, we were driven by the excitement of coming off the last album and feeling we could do anything, really.”
Rowlands also identifies that the record “has a sheen to it” and was the product of the duo becoming “obsessed” with making what they considered to be the perfect version of an album.
“A lot of time was spent trying to make it perfect. Whereas other music we’ve made, we spent a lot of time making it imperfect. This was us trying to make something that just felt right, as soon as you heard it.”
He continues: “It was a time when we were trying to squeeze in everything we liked about music, everything we wanted to say with our music, trying to get all these elements of our band in one record that didn’t feel disjointed or bolted together.”
“All our records are influenced by our first connection with acid house, and everything within that – the sort of intoxicating feeling that we had when we first found dance music,” he continues. “Obviously we were going out a lot and we were playing live a lot, and I suppose we were playing bigger stages. It’s almost like a sort of feedback loop for us: when we’re DJing or when we’re playing live, some of the music gets really influenced by where we imagine playing it.”
Featuring huge singles including Hey Boy Hey Girl, Let Forever Be, Music:Response and Out Of Control, Surrender sold over 2.3 million copies worldwide in the 25 years since its release.
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