It could be fair to say that, besides design and fashion, WhoMadeWho has become one of Denmark’s biggest exports. With awe-inspiring performances around the world, from Burning Man to Tulum, or in Ibiza, Brazil or Egypt, the Copenhagen trio has become a staple of the electronic music jet set.
But if their presence has become so ubiquitous these last years, it’s probably because they go through great length to create not only music, but a whole multi-sensory experience. Their new tour set-up, perfect for their famous hybrid show (which combines live instruments and electronic elements), incorporates a unique stage design by the renowned Danish architecture studio BIG and dynamic visuals to carry the crowd in a whole new dimension.
We recently touched base with these three laid-back Danes and were left with only one question: who can stop WhoMadeWho?
It could be interesting to start with the way WhoMadeWho has evolved, from a bold indie-rock band to a global electronic music phenomenon… When and what was the “tipping point” for you? Was there such a moment when you said, “Wow guys, we made it”?
Ah, the tipping point! It’s funny because there were so many little ‘almost there’ moments over the years, but if I had to pinpoint one, it would be the Cercle performance. We filmed this set in front of the Abu Simbel temple in Egypt and it went totally viral. It was around the time everyone was locked down, right in the middle of COVID. Suddenly, people around the world were discovering us – we’d been doing our thing for years, but now it was in front of a global audience that really connected with the energy. Post-COVID, the demand was just insane. After years of a slow and steady build-up, this one performance sent us into a whole new level of visibility. We went from a respected act with a niche following to, well… let’s say we could finally say, ‘Wow, guys, we actually did it!’ I mean, Danish modesty aside, it was a big shift. We had offers, shows, collaborations coming from everywhere. Cercle gave people a new way to experience us, and it was like hitting fast-forward on our trajectory.
And through all this musical and aesthetic evolution, is there a common thread in everything you’ve been doing? Something that holds together your first album from 2005 and Kiss & Forget, the last one?
I’d like to think so. Maybe it’s just us not knowing exactly what we’re doing but always having a clear feeling of what we want! There’s this consistency in keeping things unexpected, always challenging ourselves to go somewhere new. From that first album to Kiss & Forget, it’s about letting the music evolve organically while staying true to the energy.
On a side note, would you say that there is anything properly Danish about WhoMadeWho, the way you see it? A way of doing things, a sense of humor, a certain perspective on life?
Well, you know, there’s Janteloven [a set of fictional laws imagined by a writer named Aksel Sandemose in the 1930s; they basically remind every Dane to never think that they are better than their neighbors, ed.], so we’re humble even when we shouldn’t be. There’s a certain dry humor, maybe, and a lightness in not taking ourselves too seriously. But also this sense of putting the quality of the life and family relationships over everything else. We need to be happy and healthy to be present as artists. It’s not worth it to suffer while being successful.
Could you give us a quick walkthrough of your creative process? We could imagine the band doing instrumentals first and then Tomas [Høffding] and Jeppe [Kjellberg] maybe trying to play the role of top-liners, experimenting with lyrics, while Tomas [Barfod] focuses on rhythmic patterns… Each member adding something until it becomes a real song…
Read the end of the Who’sWho interview in the pages of Dedicate 41
Interview : Thomas Mondémé / Photographie : Polina Vinogradova & Kristoffer Juhl
