You Don't Need To Make An LP To Grab Your Audience's Attention Anymore

"We've always wanted to play a show or festival on New Year's Eve," says Ulrik Denizou Lund, half of Lemaitre. The Norwegian electro duo are bringing their live show — a full-band affair with a drummer, guitarist, and brass — to Australia, and will be playing Falls Festival when the calendar turns over to 2017. "Usually, we try to make a big thing out of [NYE], but it's the one night of the year where everything fucks up, that you have too much expectations so it just ends up disappointing. It's nice knowing where you're gonna be in advance."

"We did something more honest to ourselves: more mellow electronic music, with synthesisers, and elements from pop music."

Given Lemaitre's smooth electro-pop sound — which is heavily influenced by Phoenix and Daft Punk — it's strange to discover that Lund was first inspired to make music after hearing Paint It Black by The Rolling Stones at the end of Full Metal Jacket. "I was probably only nine, ten years old," Lund laughs. "It was just on TV. There was a channel showing all the Kubrick films. It sounds weird that I ended up watching Full Metal Jacket, but I remember thinking it was a really cool film. And at the end, when The Rolling Stones came on, I thought: 'man, I've gotta learn to play guitar.'"

Lund then formed his first band in middle school, Goods Delivery, in thrall to the Stones, Beatles, and Strokes. At the time, Lund was also listening to copious amounts of Daft Punk and Basement Jaxx, and worked at home on electronic productions through high school. In 2010, he and school pal Ketil Jansen started Lemaitre with one goal: "We basically wanted to be like Justice," Lund says. "But we quickly found out that we couldn't just sound like Justice; we couldn't make the kind of sounds that they had. So, we did something more honest to ourselves: more mellow electronic music, with synthesisers, and elements from pop music."

In the past six years, Lemaitre have released eight EPs and a host of singles; their releases defined by their matching cover-art, and the notable fact that they've yet to release an LP. "It's much easier to be happy with four tracks that you're working on than with three times that many," Lund offers. "It's really hard to get 10, 12 songs that we think are good enough, that are really, really strong, that it demands to be an album. We want to release new music all the time, and I think people now are more interested in just getting new music, whether it's just a new song or a whole album. People are using to getting single tracks or EPs through Soundcloud or Spotify, I don't think format is as important as it used to be. I grew up listening to albums from front-to-back, but I rarely do that anymore; I just skim through them, and find the tracks that I like. You don't need to make an album to capture people's attention any more; you can do that just releasing one track."