Photo Courtesy TNGHT
It’s been seven years since Hudson Mohawke and Lunice unexpectedly changed the face of pop music with the unleashing of _TNGHT_ onto the world.
Loaded with instant-classic bangers like “Higher Ground,” and “Goooo,” the duo helped usher in the pop-obsessed era of _trap music_, a genre which bridged together Southern-influenced rap music with electronic beats. Before you could even wrap your brain around what exactly were the alien sounds coming from your speakers, the group was everywhere. They played one of the weekend’s most hyped sets at the 2013 Coachella, then, while playing at Brooklyn’s famed Music Hall of Williamsburg, Kanye West showed up on stage where they performed his track “Cold.” By the time Mr. West released his next album, _Yeezus_, the tracklist included a TNGHT producer credit on “Blood on the Leaves,” (arguably his greatest song), along with a sample from the duo.
Then, in 2013, at the height of their influence—a time when fans were salivating at the thought of new music—their label announced the group would embark on an indefinite hiatus; which was the last time we heard from TNGHT. Until this fall, when the group announced the arrival of _II_, an EP promising seven unreleased tracks.
Throughout the course of _II’s_ exhilarating, genre-defying tracklist, TNGHT indulges the listener on an MDMA-infused safari, with metallic drums juxtaposed against Lunice’s screams. Self-described as “music against podcasts, music against coffee shops,” it’s their album where they stop giving a fuck and start having fun. It’s a long-awaited release that actually lives up to the hype built over the past seven years.
_Flaunt_ spoke with Hudson Mohawke and Lunice (real names: Ross Birchard and Lunice Fermin Pierre II) about their latest project, their undying influence, and what they’ve been doing for the past few orbits around the sun.
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**_You’ve been considered one of the architects of the really popular sounds pumping out of the studios today, which meshes hip hop and electronica. Seven years after you guys came together, did you envision this style of production would achieve the level that it does now?_**
**Lunice:** We never even thought oh our sound was gonna be so influential over time. We were just more concerned about how it sounded to us. It sounded interesting, something we couldn’t pinpoint.
**Hudson Mohawk:** And you know given also that a good couple years before the first record, probably around 2006 or 2007 and onwards, we were doing shows and Dj-sets and a lot of what I was playing, from my point of view, would be like rap songs. I guess since both of us come from that hip-hop/rap production background, you’re making shit with the intention to have a rapper on it, and by the time it gets to a vocalist, their like ‘ah there is too much going on in this to have any vocals on it.’ And then it accidentally becomes its own track. So it’s like an accidental thing almost you know?
Photo Credit: Tom Keelan
**_What culminated to where you wanted to get back together and renew this collaboration, and if you wanna get into specifics, what brought along the initial hiatus?_**
**HM:** I guess as far as getting together for this record, when we decided to take a break, the notion was, if there comes a point where we feel like doing another record, then let’s do it. And if that time doesn’t come, and it doesn’t feel right, then let’s not do it, because the last thing I wanna do is force some shit out for the air if it doesn’t feel natural to us.
**_It seems like what you did was subversive in a lot of ways, the way the music industry landscape has shifted. There is such an expectation to keep on producing, keep on making a steady flow of output, and it’s like no, that not always how it works._**
**L:** Yes, exactly and I’ve learned over the years that kind of workflow, just generally comes from a place of a very competitive environment because it’s those kinds of people who are trying to compete with the top chart. So it makes sense in that context – the competition. But for us, it has always been what we like first before we get into anything else. And that doesn’t play well in that kind of environment, because it has nothing to compare with.
**_Right._**
**L:** That’s why many sounds sound familiar, because that is what it is in the competitive field. You got to sound familiar, in order to sound like what’s number 1. And that was the route we _didn’t_ wanna go, only because it suppresses or own creative flow or own creative direction as a whole. We are more of the long-term. We always believe in that because it gives us that freedom.
**Right, I wanted to touch upon that as well. Sonically-speaking, there could be lots of differentiations made. Your debut album had songs that you could call them bangers— maximization at the forefront. There are some of those big sounds, big room tunes in _II,_ but there are also these more mellow compositions. How did you navigate that, how would you personally describe the differences between where you are at now versus where you were at before. Walk me through a track of your choice, I’m curious about the production process.**
**HM:** Some of our favorite artists can make shit that maybe doesn’t have those templates, formulaic elements as before, but the personality and sort of attitude behind it are the same and it comes through. I think those are the kind of artists that we aspire to be.
**L:** One example I like to explain is the track “Serpent,” because it’s the first song we made after we came back and I feel it’s a similar energy to how Ross was saying we made our first song years ago. Working on “Serpent,” it came from a similar place of joy. There was no set direction; a lot of one-take recordings were happening. For example, we would start working on different synths, and we would just make a bunch of ambient music. We were just making a bunch of sounds just to feel anything to get the senses going. And then at that point, Ross went downstairs to get something. And within that time I was playing one of his instruments and I started writing a melody around the sounds. I wasn’t thinking it would be a track. I was just playing it for myself, I thought it was a tranquil melody. He came upstairs and was like, ‘oh I like that, let’s record that.’ We started building off that, eventually adding the drums. I started yelling a bunch of crazy things, which became a big part of the song. There’s a point where I started barking, after our neighbor’s dog started to bark back at us for how loud we were being. That sort of explains how everything went in the beginning from the first project and into the second project. More of the personality, playfulness, and joy is what we are doing here. It isn’t work, it’s a fun way to experiment and create ideas.
Photo Credit: Tom Keelan
**_It seems very personal; a lot of spontaneity involved._**
**L:** Yes. You can’t replicate that kind of spontaneity because it comes from us, you know what I mean? We are very happy that we are able to express that.
**_I know we have alluded to it earlier, but I’m just curious to what have been, what were, and what might be, if any, challenges you might have experienced coming back to the studio together after all these years. Or has it generally been smooth sailing?_**
**HM:** It was refreshing to get back together, and it sounds super fucking cheesy LA, but it’s almost like getting back together and rekindling our friendship was part of like the process of making the record.
**L:** Exactly.
**HM:** It wasn’t something we stressed; it was more like we talked about it at the end of the first project, if such fame arises, it would be fun to do this again to see what happens, then we’ll do it, and if not, let’s not do it. When we started this project, as with the first one, there was no intention of it being released—it was just like let’s fuck around and see what happens. I think we definitely take steps to assure that it doesn’t become a stressful thing.
**_What artist are you into at the moment? What kind of music do you listen to on a Sunday afternoon at home, what are you putting on that you are really feeling?_**
**L:** At any given moment, since I have a whole sound system, I might just have random ambient music playing or just waterfalls or wind blowing through trees—I got it all scheduled for sunrise and sunset. I like to play with the natural senses of nature. Sounds, smell, I have a whole incense collection. I love that kind of stuff.
**HM:** In the last week or two, that Westside Gunn record just came out, which I really like. Very New York rap shit. I’m really into that. Jacques Greene’s album just came out, It’s awesome.
**_Will there be tour dates, concerts? What does the future hold as of now?_**
**HM:** There are a handful of dates that we just announced. It’s always important to keep the events special and relatively limited, and not do a fucking 85-day tour, shit like that. We want to maintain that aspect where we are trying to make it more of an experience. It’s not something we want to do every night.
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Interview by [Liam Casey](https://www.flaunt.com/content?author=5cc78453c228a50001ed8b47)
**Upcoming Tour Dates:**
12/12 - New York, NY @ The Dance
3/13 - London, UK @ Village Underground
3/17 - Paris, France @ Le Trabendo
3/18 - Berlin, Germany @ Gretchen
3/20 - Cologne, Germany @ CBE
3/21 - Utrecht, Netherlands @ TivoliVredenburg
3/22 - Brussels, Belgium @ Orangerie
Tickets (on-sale 11/15/19): [http://tng.ht/](http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=001MAAdRs86bmdbcGpIAMo2XDJh298BW0c1BjSQDxsPLiQ4a7LT4XzwYzOplIDw4nSAUUVDEkPp76aNw3YOVLSTL4FPGHAlUdeQfuzIP_T6cVx1LLPMbJ7YyxNBrIqBdj8KbosDwqrkQgS94gG3OKQkDRYbK0_udupy&c=uIppbDK5jEHYnsgiYJ6fdGYzuaePFFIqQ79qcshIBmCA1qnRunLnGg==&ch=1n-hsdb7LHUvjieHXEBWkj5_eyImSc1h7-lxd8XgwX_-QAkme0REPw==)
**TNGHT**
**_II_**
**Warp / Lucky Me Records**
1\. Serpent
2\. Dollaz
3\. First Body
4\. Club Finger
5\. What\_it\_is
6\. I'm In a Hole
7\. Gimme Summn
