Honey

 

Honey

Album ∙ Electronic ∙ 2024

Caribou

More than 20 years into his career, Dan Snaith continues to shape-shift as an artist. His sixth proper album as Caribou finds the 46-year-old electronic pop polymath diving headlong into big-room dance sounds, more so than ever before: French-touch-indebted synths, city-flattening wub-wub basslines, and the type of clipped-vocal UK garage melodies that pop artists like PinkPantheress have favored as of late. Snaith is taking clear inspiration from his acclaimed full-length under his dance-floor-focused Daphni moniker, 2022’s Cherry, as well as the recent stadium-pleasing gestures from left-of-center contemporaries Jamie xx and Four Tet’s Kieran Hebden. The result is the sound of an artist newly invigorated and truly having fun with the music they’re making.

Honey isn’t the first time that Snaith has turned his attention towards body-moving music. 2010’s Swim fused techno’s intensity with his career-long penchant for all things psychedelic and heady, while Our Love from 2014 found Snaith rubbing elbows with the melodic bass music explosion that marked much of early-2010s electronic music, all the while applying his intimate and resolutely human songwriting point of view. If those albums felt like a combination of his established tendencies with dance music, then Honey feels like a complete breakthrough into pure pop territory.

The warm synth waves of “Come Find Me” sound lovingly ripped from Daft Punk’s astral playbook, while Snaith’s soft-focus vocals on “Over Now” are centered in the midst of a spangly disco beat that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Dua Lipa record. Of course, this is a Caribou record, so he has plenty of dazzling and trippy tricks up his sleeve regardless; bear witness to the perpetually ascendant “Dear Life,” which chops up vocal samples in a flurry of glistening synth trickles, or the endless melodic ziggurats of “Climbing,” which recall Nordic space-disco greats like Todd Terje and Hans-Peter Lindstrøm. Every time Snaith seems like he might be touching terra firma, he seemingly blasts off thousands of miles into the stratosphere instead—a dazzling bait-and-switch that makes Honey endlessly replayable, as well as one of his most pure and potent works to date.