INTERVIEW: Dragonette return with first studio album in six years 'Twennies': "I want this to be what my sound is - this is what I am"
Interview: Jett Tattersall
Image: Shervin Lainez
Canada’s Dragonette (real name Martina Sorbara) has been releasing music since 1998, first as a solo artist and from 2005 as part of Dragonette the band. Although chart success has been limited outside their home country, Dragonette received critical acclaim for their electro-synthpop and scored a major global breakthrough in 2010 when they featured on the Martin Solveig hit single ‘Hello’.
After Sorbara’s marriage with Dragonette bassist Dan Kurtz broke down, the band disintegrated with 2016’s Royal Blues album their last recording as a band and Sorbara has since carried on the name as a solo project.
Last Friday, she released her first studio album in six years with Twennies. Choosing to work with just one creative partner, producer Dan Farber (Lizzo, Dizzee Rascal), the album is one of reflection and Sorbara looking back on her life. Written in just a couple of weeks, it retains Dragonette’s focus on electro-synthpop but with a greater exploration of genre over 10 delicious tracks.
The album opens with recent single ‘Seasick’ which hits hard straight away, with Sorbara looking back at a failed relationship and the “traumatic heartbreak” that goes along with it. “I get seasick floating alone on the couch…Cause you got the taste for somebody else,” she sings against a thumping drum beat and a more indie soundscape with just a hint of electronica. Second track ‘Hysteria’ also carries a more subdued electro-synth feel, and it is not until the third track and first single ‘New Suit’ that we get the full, glorious electronic-synth sound with it’s chanty chorus and message of looking forward.
Title track ‘Twennies’ is a hypnotic, slick electro track that practically shimmies its way into your heart, while ‘T-Shirt’, an album highlight, is a slower pop track that is an ode to fierce independence and a refusal to commit. “I wear your t-shirt a lot / I swear you're making to much of that…Don't make it mean what you want.”
The second half of the album introduces a slower vibe with ‘Winning’ - which started with a sample from The Phantom of the Opera - a lush, ballad intermittently interrupted by stuttering, electronic beats that looks back at the years wasted on a relationship that ultimately ended, and ‘Stormy’ is a gorgeous, country inflected song based on acoustic guitar yet mixed with abstract electronic sounds.
‘Good Intentions’ brings the pace up again with its pop-rock feel, before the album closes with ‘Outie’, a more acoustic track which again takes country and rock as its main sonic inspirations with electronic beats popping up throughout the track. It is both a subtle and rousing way to finish the album and lyrically closes everything with a sense of looking forward and letting bygones be bygones: “Don't take me so for real, I don't ever feel hard feelings,” she sings at the end of the song.
Twennies is arguably Dragonette’s greatest album, faithful to their electro-synth roots but exploring multiple different sounds. “It’s a true hybrid of my original influences as a child and what I’ve learned along the way. It feels so representative of my musical journey,” Sorbara says. “It’s my favourite thing I’ve ever done. I’m so proud of it.” We recently caught up with her to find out more.
Hi Marina! So good to see you today. Let's talk about Twennies because I could listen to you sing this album all day. I feel like I'm back at some kind of roller disco, not in a disco kind of way but just the feels that it makes me feel.
I like that. It is much more groovy and less party. It's more ‘chill groove’ than some albums in the past. I'm really proud of this record. Partly because I didn't really know that it was gonna happen, I didn't know if I was going to be Dragonette anymore. And then I just made this record, and I'm like, ‘Yeah’. I just decided to make music that I wanted to make not knowing what I was going to do with it. And then I was like, ‘Yeah, this can be Dragonette, I don't have to do something else.’
What was behind the thought process that you weren't going to be Dragonette anymore?
I'd had a kid, I split up with the the other creative partner and there was just a long span of time. I met with a label who was kind of gung ho to be the next release partner for Dragonette and they gave me a big playlist of songs like, ‘this is what we can hear Dragonette doing’. I was like, ‘I don't want to do that’. The idea of what I was supposed to do or what I thought I was supposed to do, some prescribed idea was not jiving with me. Also the sour taste of the breakup, a part of me was a little bit, maybe, like fuck it.
I decided to start working with this guy in LA who I really love and I just had great sessions with. He came to Toronto and we wrote all these songs that we were so in love with. It actually started with a song or two that I wrote with him when I first met him, and I was like, ‘gosh, those songs are so cool, I wish they could be Dragonette songs’. Dragonette wasn't the flexible project that I feel it is now like, in my mind, I was supposed to write music that would get on the radio. And now it’s like what even is radio?!
It's amazing how we do that. People are always blaming the media and society and conglomerates for pigeonholing us and putting us into boxes, but we do it so freely with ourselves.
Definitely. It's funny to think of my frame of mind when the first song I wrote with Donnie, my collaborator on this record, ‘Good Intentions’. It’s such a cool song, I love it so much. We've been practising it live, it's a perfect song for me to sing. And I remember being like, ‘damn, too bad I can't release that’. I don't know why I thought that, I guess there were more exterior influences, for lack of a better word, business partners in the band. Now it's me, and I'm like, ‘Oh, I can literally do whatever I want’. A sense of freedom came over me when I realised, this could be a Dragonette record, this has to be a Dragonette record. I want this to be what my sound is, this is what I am. This is going to sound bad or weird, but it's almost like Dragonette before was a little bit devoid of one piece of me. It was me, but there was a little spot where I wasn't showing myself. My roots are folk music and hippie music, like Ani DiFranco, Indigo Girls, Sinead O'Connor and country music. The birth of Dragonette was really rebelling against that. Amazing big beats and and digital synths and club sounds and all that stuff was very exciting, but I really didn't think I was allowed to show this other part because I was supposed to be something else.
The world has shifted in perspective and music, and you must have seen that throughout your career. Genre is still a thing, but people are more freely able to experiment, and to have a much more open collection. I'm always curious about the artists because of course as listeners, we don't have to give $25 to the music shop and buy that one CD and make sure it's the right choice, which is what we used to do. Now you can cherry pick, but for the artist, you've just said you felt like you had to stay in this one realm and as great as it was, there was just those little pieces that influenced you as the musician that you were never able to share.
Yeah, I mean there were elements of every album that had smaller more stripped back songs, but I always felt like I was being naughty or I was like ‘can I do this?’. The reality is, in this day and age, people are streaming music and most people are not going to hear the whole record anyway. So people might only hear the songs that are more in the Dragonette, old school style. There actually isn't any song in this album that is kind of big big beat club music at all.
I want to talk about the title track ‘Twennies’ because this is like a late night arcade drive. And you're like almost hitched soprano vocals, leading it to a climax that just ends in this beat that it's so good. Talk me through this glorious song.
In terms of the lyric, it’s really about this idea of being conscious of the fact that the world is progressing, and technology is progressing and we're all kind of careening into the future. And at some point I'm gonna let go of that future journey. I'm not talking about death, I'm talking about that point that you just stopped participating in the advances [of society]. Do you ever look at your parents and wonder, ‘When did you stop caring about what new music is coming out? When did you decide that you just can't figure out how to use an iPhone and open an attachment?’ It's super simple for me, but that’s going to happen to us all. Come on, when did you stop being so flexible? I feel like it's starting to happen to me a little bit, honestly like how many social media platforms do I have to learn and when am I allowed to just decide not to anymore? It's amazing all of the advances that we make and all of the incredible things that this technology enables, but the more I get it, the less I want it. And then at some point I’m going to unable and I'm going to decide that there's other things that are more important, or just, literally, my brain will shut down. And that's what the song is about.
It's so beautiful. And how did that come to be the title track? How did that encompass the collection as a whole?
Well, there's a reference in another song called ‘Winning’: ‘I spent all my 20s on you’. It’s kind of a double meaning, my 20s in my wallet and my actual 20s. I felt there was this theme of now, the 20s the 2020s, and awakening into myself now, as the person I am in the 20s versus who I was in my 20s. My journey and what my experience then made me what I am now. It's the same for every single person. It was just a recurring theme.
You recently made a hit list of the songs you were listening to in your 20s as well, which was quite an eye opener for people that have turned to you to dance. With dance music, its role in celebrating women I've always found really interesting, because you've always had a lot of women at the forefront clutching the microphone with dance music, but at the same time we’re sold this concept that after a certain age, or a point in your life, particularly motherhood, it’s like, ‘now it's embarrassing, you should probably leave’. You've always charged to the front and just gone ‘screw it’.
I've literally been talking about this so much because I think about it a lot in terms of all different forms of art. And there are some there are some languages just totally and my brain is fried. There are some places in the artistic world where a wise old voice is where the money is. That's what banks are investing in, they're buying $10 million pieces of art and this guy's art is so valuable because he's bold and stood the test of time. And for some reason with music we are so interested in what 16 year old girls have to say. I am interested in that, but it's so interesting how the attention level just drops off. We don't want to know what you are talking about anymore, it's not interesting to us, what is the next 16 year old pop sensation singing about? I need to know. It's just this really strange concept. Men as they grow older, like say Radiohead, they just get more and more credit, more and more traction. The amount of women who get old and get more and cred, there are so few. It’s like we haven't decided what we want to hear from them As a whole, as a culture, we are not sure what we want our ageing females to be. We always want to correct them, we just don't want to hear them.
You've raised an excellent point, we don't know what it is yet. If you look back at artists like Nina Simone, and Billie Holiday, and all these amazing, amazing jazz and soul singers, we always thought there was so much older but they weren't. They were just done up to look like much older women because the only way we'd accept them was if they earned their stripes, in a way. It's interesting now in the pop realm, because quite often an artist will disappear for a little while and then come back and do some kind of sexy jazz album, and that's allowed. That's a window you can do, you take a step back, get your menopause in order, and then come back and in a floor length, sequinned gown.
Yeah, it's totally true. That's kind of the formula, but this is the problem. We're so used to our female artists selling us sex at the same time as whatever else they are doing. They have to be selling sexy at the same time. As soon as that’s not the thing that you are comfortable with, you look like somebody who's like ‘Oh, I'm still trying to sell the sex’, and you don't believe it or the audience doesn't believe it. Or you're not selling sex and so people aren't listening to you. We are expecting our women to be young and sexy. I'm not judging older women for being sexy or for going forward in that way at all. But I think the reason that the attention drops off of women as they're ageing in music is because the expectation is that we're supposed to be selling sex. So either, you're not sexy enough and so like, ‘What are you even doing? Like, oh my God, sit down.’ Or you're still making music and you're not playing that game, and so the audience is like, ‘Okay, but where's the sex?’
I'm not even talking about overt sexiness. I'm not talking about grinding, like ‘Wet Ass Pussy’, that stuff. I’m talking about on the whole, whether I'm disrobing or if I'm in a tunic, there's a subconscious under pinning of we're supposed to be beautiful and selling the idea of female sexuality. And if that's not in some way in play in what we're putting across, then the audience is confused.
I love it. Following the glide of this album Twennies, what else coming up for you this year?
I'm gonna do some shows, I’m playing in Toronto, like the first show I’ve played in five years, that's in November. It's totally petrifying and very, very exciting at the same time. I have a bunch of songs on my hard drive that I'm really excited to get into the pipeline of teaming them up to become another album. The process of making this album’s so different from albums in the past, it was just an immersion and so now it feels very exciting. Not easy, but manageable and something I'm looking forward to.
Twennies is out now via BMG. You can buy and stream here.
To keep up with all things Dragonette you can follow her on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and Twitter.
