Forget what you think you know about London’s party scene, Crystal Fighters have the perfect remedy for those jaded eyes and ears scorched from the remnants of nu rave’s neon flash in the pan.
“We’re evoking sounds of old and sounds of love. Our music is very passionate,” explains Gilbert, one of the band’s chief knob-twiddlers. He’s not wrong. Even the band’s origins possess a kind of self-mythologising romanticism. According to the official history, frontwoman Laure – there’s two girls and three guys – discovered a manuscript of an unfinished opera while clearing out her deceased grandfather’s home somewhere in the Basque countryside. Enchanted by the prophetic scrawls, the band has sworn to finish the grandfather’s story, setting the emotional inferences to a high impact sound.
Described by Gilbert as, “extremely high energy with a folk twist”, Crystal Fighters draw on the shared Basque heritage of the two front women to bring traditional melodies and percussion instruments into collision with chest crushing bass and serotonin-flushed synth stabs, as wonderful and ridiculous as anything from old rave’s golden era. Their forthcoming single ‘I Love London’ goes even further, with its Kudoro flavoured rhythms and 8 bit squalls sounding like a squat party Buraka Som Sistema. Suffice to say they’ve built a heavy-duty arsenal of sound that’s guaranteed to slay the capital’s dancefloors. “Aside from bastardising melodies from old Basque songs, the other thing we really enjoy is bassline music, techno, drum and bass, soca, but a bit faster and a bit heavier. Our intent is to really smack people in the face.”
Having already played alongside the likes of Wiley, Benga and Zombie Disco Squad, Crystal Fighters have built up a reputation for carnage-inducing live shows that capture their true essence. “We go to gigs and we see people standing around watching bands, but then you go to a nightclub and the DJs right in the corner but everyone is dancing. We want to bring that club vibe to live gig venues, and allow people to have fun – to inject energy into the London scene with a new type of music, while retaining old influences and that traditional feel.”
Louise Brailey