For RÜFÜS DU SOL, Playing Coachella Feels Like Catharsis

For some musicians, Coachella is just another festival they're lined up to play—the kickoff of a summer of festival stages they'll be playing. But for Australian electronic outfit RÜFÜS DU SOL, who are coming back to the festival grounds after taking a year off, it's not just another show. It's where their American takeover began, and it's where their latest album came to fruition. Coachella is the band's holy ground.

Though the band released SOLACE in October of last year, they've been waiting since its release to play it at Coachella, where they say "our stories began." James Hunt, one of the band's three members, recalls the turning point that their first Coachella set, back in 2016, brought them, saying, "We'd been coming to the U.S. for five years, playing shows, and we'd been growing slightly here and there. But then playing that show... from there, it felt things started gaining more momentum." The band received even more recognition in 2017 when it played again—and is now back to bring Coachella Valley its new album.

Jon George, another member of the group, tells me that the band was inspired by places like Coachella Valley and Joshua Tree, and that made its way into the music. "We wrote the last record in L.A., and we spent a bit of time going out to Joshua Tree and out to the desert near Coachella," says George. "And so, that was obviously a big influence on the music and the soundscape. It's almost like another planet out there."

This album is also a reckoning with their move from Australia to the United States, and how they dealt with living together and creating again after they had garnered so much buzz. The result is an introspective, often dark LP, which also tackles topics like depression. Says Hunt, this came from them being "swept up in a whirlwind" of only paying attention to their music, and not listening to themselves as much as they should have. He explains, "It took us into a darker place, because we were not listening to certain aspects of our lives, and then that just started naturally coming out in what we were making."

And though it must have been hard to put something so personal into the world, it's paid off in full. The band started touring just a few weeks after they released SOLACE, and fans have had an intense reaction to it. "We were quickly swept away by the overall positive energy going back with it all," says George. "Seeing the emotionality from people, was quite touching. I've said it a few times onstage, how for us the process was super-cathartic, it's just like therapy for us, being in the studio. It's a way for us to get stuff off our chests and not let things engulf us and overtake us, so that's our process. And then for it to affect other people, as a result, is pretty mind-blowing, so we were definitely taken aback by that."

Along with their set, the band is also bringing one of its songs, called "Underwater," to life in Coachella's Antarctica Dome during the first weekend. There, you'll be able to dive right into the music video for the song, which was directed by Radiohead and OK Go collaborator JamesFrost. Longtime Radiohead fan Hunt says that having Frost as a collaborator was a dream come true; though he was admittedly starstruck, he was thrilled to discover that Frost was amazing to work with: "He had a really strong creative awareness, and he's really specific in terms of what he likes," which made the process a breeze.

George notes that what Frost created for the Antarctic Dome was not exactly what they had expected to visually accompany their song, but that that's actually a good thing, saying that one of their great loves is to "watch someone else bring a vision to [a song]." "Sometimes that can go in a different direction to what you really envisioned," he says. "For us, it's always exciting getting to see what someone's getting from what we've made, and that's exactly what's happened here. It's a really good complement to work with what we've created."

RÜFÜS DU SOL are playing both weekends of Coachella, on April 12 and April 19.