On their 2019 album, The Weight, the Amsterdam electronic duo Weval channeled the fuzzy, psychedelic soundscapes of the 1970s, complete with hypnotic vocals, organ hooks, and syncopated grooves. The LP was geared more toward headphone listening than the club, so when it came time to write 2022’s Time Goes, Harm Coolen and Merijn Scholte Albers were eager to kick things up a notch. “It was the middle of the pandemic, and we were thinking about what playing live meant for us,” Coolen tells Apple Music. “Like, if we can ever play again, what would we want to play?” Those existential conversations led the pair to revisit some of their happiest touring memories—shows when they really connected with the audience and could feel themselves connecting with each other, too. “Most of the time, it’s when you’re all dancing together,” Albers says. “That was always the most beautiful part.”
On this tight, four-track EP, Coolen says their mission was “just to have a huge amount of fun.” For the two self-described studio nerds, this meant digging back into the sounds of their childhood—to hip-hop innovators like DJ Shadow and RJD2, for example—and trying to recreate those beats without using samples. “We really wanted to record those beats ourselves. Most of the records we grew up on used samples from the ’60s and ’70s. But we were like, ‘How do you actually record that from zero?’” Read more about how they achieved it in our track-by-track interview below.
“All Alone”
Merijn Scholte Albers: “This track was made two weeks after a breakup [and is about] being alone again. We wanted to make a track that sounds like a hug. It’s mainly about feeling less lonely—about knowing you aren’t the only one with this feeling, especially at this time.”
“Time Goes”
Harm Coolen: “We wanted to make a track inspired by trip-hop and big beat of the late ’90s: DJ Shadow, RJD2, Amon Tobin, even The Matrix soundtrack, which was actually the first record I ever bought. It was a whole new world of beatmaking for us. So, with this project, we started with asking, ‘How can we record drums that sound like those records without using samples?’ In this case, we had our friend come by to play the drums, and it took hundreds, maybe even thousands of takes to get it right. We had to experiment with all sorts of arrangements in the studio—the number of drums, the number of microphones, the location of the microphones, the drumming technique, and so on—before finally getting close to the samples we wanted to imitate.”
“Minute by Minute”
MSA: “The inspiration for this track was the beginning of Underworld’s ‘Born Slippy.’ We always wanted to have the intro chords as a whole track.”
“March On”
HC: “Since the beginning of the pandemic, Merijn has been trying to learn the drums. After a lot of jam sessions, he made an iPhone recording to see how bad his skills were at that moment, and he found an old loop that actually didn’t sound that bad. It sounded usable. We made a whole song around that one wild drum take, which more or less reflected the title and sounded like marching. It’s kind of like our ‘let’s go wild’ track.”