Lucky Iris – ‘Fall in Love With the DJ’ album review: essential electro-pop
If you’re looking for good electronic pop music, the last place you want to look is the charts. Instead, you can find it emerging from sweaty grassroots venues, where artists can turn gigs into full-scale parties, almost breaking the speakers with noise that fills every inch of the room and beyond. That’s where you’ll find Lucky Iris, the Leeds-based duo making the kind of songs that’ll have you wishing you were at the club, even if it’s 10am on a Monday morning.
The Skinny: Having released several collections of singles since 2020, Lucky Iris have now made their most unforgettable mixtape yet, Fall in Love With the DJ, consisting of six tracks infused with pure electro-pop magic. The lilt that emanates from lead singer Maeve Florsheim’s voice gives each track a coy sensibility, as though she’s winking at us as she delivers her words over crunching, glitching, floor-filling synths. She invites us into this world of unrelenting partying, where the club is a place to feel totally free from restraint, a place to “fall in love,” perhaps with the person playing the music.
The mixtape opens with the title track, which feels like the journey from home to the club, the synths maintaining a steadiness akin to the Uber journey into town, before eventually giving way to spiralling electronics which build and build. By the second track, ‘I Just Want To Dance’, we’re at the club, where alcohol mingles with hazy confrontations and conversations – you can’t be sure what you’re doing, but all you know is that you should be dancing.
Lucky Iris makes a pretty convincing manifesto on Fall in Love With the DJ; I’m positive that even the most reluctant party-goers wouldn’t turn down a night out after listening to just one of the tracks. As Florsheim, who finds her creative equal in Lucky Iris’ other mastermind, Jasper Exley, sings over the crunch of ‘Play Me Like A Speaker’ arguably their magnum opus, you really get a sense that you’re listening to something special.
Those opening notes, warping alongside a piercing beat, take on increasing resonance as everything starts to lose stability, frantically darting before giving way to pure abandon. I always imagined myself listening to something like this in the club when I was a teenager who’d watched too many repeats of Skins, enamoured by that iconic Crystal Castles-soundtracked breakdown sequence.
You can certainly hear traces of the 2000s band here, as well as the clear influence of PC Music icons like Sophie and Hannah Diamond, the latter of whom Lucky Iris have already shared the stage with. The duo aren’t derivative, though; rather, they continue this lineage and make it their own, Florsheim’s ultra-feminine voice a defining element of the music’s appeal. Their music is playful, sexy, a little silly, but most importantly, incredibly fun.
The Verdict: Who cares if you spill your drink everywhere or lose your balance? Lucky Iris draws you into a hedonistic world of kissing strangers, making friends with the people dancing next to you, and forgetting any worries that might be playing on your mind.
Standout track: ‘Play Me Like A Speaker’
Release Date: January 23rd | Producer: Lucky Iris | Label: Launchpad+ and EMI North
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