When we were making our last album, we didn’t go into the studio with a plan. That’s not how Dave and I work. We don’t have preconceived ideas, strategies, or a list of things we want to say. We just went in, and musically things started to happen, and lyrically, a lot of what you hear on the album reflects conversations we were actually having with each other.
Titles like All Systems Are Lying and Meanwhile on the Continent just crept in, because every day you’d put the TV on or look at your phone and think: these are interesting times. We came up with the title maybe two years ago and it feels more relevant than ever. It was never a decision to make a political album. We just didn’t realise how political the zeitgeist was among us until it was already there.
That sense of the world shifting beneath your feet runs through the album, and it’s hard to separate it from what’s happening to music itself. The question of how much the industry has changed is interesting to me, because I also find myself thinking about how much hasn’t.
Spotify uses the same tricks that some of the majors were using before them. The players have just moved from one side of the table to the other. Young artists are being – and I’ll say it plainly – ripped off a little bit, under this idea that you can do everything yourself now, that you’re liberated. But look at how the deals are constructed. Look at how music is consumed.
We run a label here at our studio and release records for other people, and these are exactly the conversations we find ourselves having. And it’s not just streaming. Brexit is a reality that people seem to want to forget about, but it has made it genuinely harder for UK bands to come to Europe and European bands to go there. The same thing is now happening with America. The barriers have multiplied. A subscription doesn’t mean every artist gets a fair share. All systems are lying, a little bit.
We always felt unable to fully play along with the system because it just didn’t work for us.
Would I have been put off entering this industry if I was starting today? Probably, yes. But I also think if it were us now, we’d use whatever we were doing as musicians and try to broaden it into other things, because that’s where I see a lot of the interesting work happening. With Soulwax, with 2ManyDJs, with everything we’ve done, we always felt unable to fully play along with the system because it just didn’t work for us. So we ended up building our own world, and looking back, that was a kind of defence mechanism.
What I notice now is that young artists are incredibly fluent; they already know they need an agent, a social presence, a sync deal. It’s impressive. But I worry they don’t get the luxury we had, which was the freedom to fuck up. To have a coming-of-age trajectory where someone could look at something and say, okay, that wasn’t great, but there’s something in there. The other thing that’s changed is how validation works. Technology tells people it’s easy to do it, so the numbers become the thing; streams, followers, how many people come to your gig. That’s what proves you exist now. Before, you could fail more quietly and still find your footing.
I don’t want to be the doomsday guy, though, because I am genuinely impressed by a lot of what I see. And I do think that ability to broadcast unconventional ideas – what Bowie had – hasn’t gone away, the impact has just changed. When Bowie did it, there was a monoculture, so the disruption was total. Now, that ethos of pushing boundaries and incorporating everything you love has become almost the template for success. Look at Rosalía, or what Charli XCX does, or even Harry Styles – they’re all saying, I’m not going to do the standard thing, but I’m going to bring all of these references with me. That’s a great way forward. But it also means what was once radical has become a kind of curatorial strategy. The people who really think differently now are probably doing something completely outside the mainstream, because you can sense when incorporation has become the expected move.
It’s precisely in the way they phrase things, the way they hit a note slightly wrong, that the magic lives.
Authenticity is a word I get asked about a lot, especially with this album. People want to know if it’s a comment on AI. What I think is happening is this: authenticity is becoming the premium. I already see young people gravitating back towards music made by humans together in a room, no laptop, no grid, because that is becoming rare. The idea of four idiots making noise together, failing and trying again – that’s not something AI will replicate in any meaningful way.
I see kids doing gigs completely outside the Live Nation ecosystem, playing in people’s living rooms, making strange music. That’s where it comes from. That’s always been where it comes from. And I think maybe in a couple of years this conversation will feel obvious, or we’ll all be talking to robots at some kind of festival where everyone is playing the drums in perfect time, which would be its own kind of hell.
The idea of lucky mistakes has always been central to how Dave and I think. Most of my favourite singers would never survive a talent show. Someone would say they’re out of tune and that would be it. Tom Waits wouldn’t last a round. But it’s precisely in the way they phrase things, the way they hit a note slightly wrong, that the magic lives.
I was lucky enough early on to record with Chris Cross, Dave Sardy, and Flood. To watch how they made Smashing Pumpkins and PJ Harvey records, which was a lot of trying and failing and performing and doing it again. It was all about performance. We call it the human way but, really, it’s just normal. And I think it will become more and more important as the antidote to everyone being on a grid.
One of the first things we said was: put your phone down
The same logic applies to live music. The one thing that shifted in that world was when people started using their phones as a way of participating – of being there without really being there. When we did the Despacio shows with James Murphy, one of the first things we said was: put your phone down. There’s not much to see visually, no light show, it’s about the communal feeling of dancing together. I think more of that will come, because people need to disconnect in order to experience whatever it is – the music, the moment, the room.
But there’s a broader issue too, which is that everything has become so mega. Every festival has gone over mega. And in becoming enormous, some of that communal feeling has thinned out. I think people will start to gravitate back towards smaller, more intentional things.
On what could practically change for artists. Well, I’m not an economist and I’m not good with money, but if streaming platforms paid artists more fairly, that would help everything downstream. And there are small, pragmatic things: if a young band is going on tour for the first three years, why do they have to pay withholding tax or foreign artist tax, which can be 35% of what little they’re earning?
A band like LCD Soundsystem, or us – if you have that many people coming to your shows, you don’t need that relief. But for an emerging band it’s a different story entirely. Just waive it for the first few years. Let them go out and show their stuff. At minimum, there should be something from government; someone an artist can go to and say, we’ve been asked to play somewhere but we’re making a loss, and have that person actually help them figure out a route through.
Here in Belgium there’s already a system where artists can apply for a kind of support visa – if you’re not working, you get help. It’s not perfect, but it exists. When we first came to the UK, that grassroots infrastructure was there too. You’d play the Fleece and Firkin, and there was a whole circuit. A lot of those venues have gone now, because it just isn’t viable. The chain that holds the whole industry together starts there. If it breaks, everything above it suffers.
I know the arts aren’t the top of any government’s agenda right now. But they’re not separate from all the noise either. If anything, they’re the antidote to it.
This conversation took place on 10 June 2026 and has been edited and condensed for clarity and flow.
Soulwax is playing at the Royal Festival hall on 21 June 2026 as part of the Southbank Centre’s annual Meltdown Festival, the world’s longest-running artist-curated music festival.
