Former Silverchair frontman, now electro-pop-soul crooner Daniel Johns just released a new EP, and is now gearing up to drop a full album later this month.
Talk will come out on May 22. Expect urban beats, angelic falsetto and all kinds of synth-led goodness. From future beats to disco grooves, we can look forward to a diverse, emotional and musically wonderful release. Johns has enlisted a keen array of collaborators to work on the album, including Lorde producer Joel Little, Melbourne’s Damn Moroda, and hip-hop producers Styalz and M-Phazes.
Here’s the new single, Cool on Fire:
With a bright atmosphere and far more of a disco influence than the deep soul heard through his recent EP Aerial Love, I’m keen to hear if we’ll hear a mixture of both, or if it’ll be more of a club-ready record, as this track indicates.
Speaking about his many changes in musical style over the years, Johns says, “I’ve always felt like most people hate everything I do but thankfully there’s always been an enthusiastic minority who seem to ‘get’ it. That’s fine with me. Anything that appeals to everyone tends to suck anyway.”
What’s funny is that when Silverchair released Frogstomp, most people went out of the way to tell me how much it sucked. Then when we made Diorama a few years later everyone started telling me how I should go back to making Frogstomp. I guess now I’ll be told to go back and make Diorama again!”
That was part of why I picked the album title too by the way. I don’t really care what most people think. Let them talk.
Here’s my opinion: Frogstomp, along with Neon Ballroom and Freak Show were among the greatest Aussie rock albums of all time. I love Frogstomp so much that I wrote a whole feature about it. I didn’t care too much for Diorama or the work Johns later did with Paul Mac, but I’ve really enjoyed his recent foray into electronic – especially the mammoth Preach.
I’ll be the first to say I didn’t take kindly to the idea of my favourite Aussie rock star hitting the synths. I couldn’t really get my head around the idea. But in the same way that people trashed Dylan for going electric, or the same way that Radiohead have divided fans all over the place because their sound changes constantly, or the same way that we eventually accepted Ice Cube as an actor and Kanye West as a fashion designer, we need to accept Daniel Johns in his current incarnation. It all comes down to the music after all, and if the music is good, the genre is irrelevant.