A new world emerges via a musical ‘big bang’ emanating from Das Koolies’ post-industrial Cardiff docklands hideaway, as the band announces that their debut album, DK.01 will be released on Fri 22 September 2023. Made with the help of contributors and influences as diverse as MC Killa Kela, 17th Century composer, Henry Purcell and their four decades together as Super Furry Animals, the album promises a genre-bending expansion of their most electronic-leaning and experimental ideas.
Quickly following up the SELL OUT success of the release of their debut The Condemned EP in March, Huw Bunford, Cian Ciarán, Dafydd Ieuan and Guto Pryce return with DK.01’s first blast of friendly fire in Best Mind F*ck Yet, forming an instant connection between their past and future. Embryonic versions having played the Furries off the stage during their MWNG tour in the mid-00’s, and featuring actor/former-SFA front man, Rhys Ifans on vocals, any band biographers will be compelled to furiously update their records as the strings-laced kraut/techno pounder is born into the band’s border-free land of possibility.
Best Mind F*ck Yet’s earthquake release comes with a new video emerging as part of the band’s creative link-up with artist, Edwin Burdis/Dah Dit Dit (Arctic Monkeys, Blossoms, The Coral), continuing to develop a visual world to complement the audio following the release of an animated video for The Condemned at the start of this year.
The release of the fifteen track DK.01 this autumn re-opens the book on the quartet’s long-term friendship and musical union at the next chapter, with their meandering tale together having begun in the vortex of north Wales’ illicit rave scene in the early-1990s. Last seen on stage together as the Furries’ final tour concluded in 2016, Bunford, Ciarán, Ieuan and Pryce reconvened Das Koolies around poker nights and half-remembered riffs shortly after, scratching a persistent, 30-year itch to perform a factory reset and deep dive into the synth-driven sound they’d heard in their heads all along.
Looking forward to the album’s release Das Koolies say: “The return has been welcomed. Unanimously. Dissent, however, will be tolerated. An abundance of ideas, new inventions and old friendships percolate, produce and persist. Come this way as a dead end is circumvented to show an open road.”
Alongside Ifans, guests set to appear on the album include influential British MC Killa Kela and the physical infrastructure of Cardiff, Wales’ capital city itself, as field recordings of percussive strikes on metallic structures make their way onto the record, symbolising the freedom with which ideas entered the studio from all possible sources.
Referring to classical composer, Henry Purcell with a bassline inspired by 300-year-old examples of the same, plus completing one demo that has existed in one form or another since 1998, DK.01 will reveal and celebrate the elasticity of time and the musical ideas within it. It will inevitably expose the band’s own liberty to do just as they please.
