The Sound Of Serendipity

Formerly a reflexogist (google Aluna Francis + reflexologist, seriously), Francis first put sound to record with indie rockers My Toys Like Me back in 2009, an act probably now more renowned for having introduced Francis to Reid via Reid's remix of Francis' track with the band, Sweetheart, than for being a band. Reid himself played guitar before he moved into production. Francis met Reid through the remix, AlunaGeorge exploded from there: the duo released their first EP You Know You Like It on Tri Angle in 2012, with success coming from the EP's single Your Drums, Your Love. Since the Anschluss of Aluna and George, Francis has leant her distinctly British vocals to high-calibre producers. She was featured surreptitiously in Rustie's Afterlight (2012) alongside the Scottish beatmaker's glacial synth; and again in Disclosure's White Noise (2012), a track probably (over) familiar to Australian ears courtesy of triple j's token carpet-bombing approach to introducing new music. Francis and Reid have also co-opted Florence + The Machine and Dirty Projectors through remixes – the former's eponymous Florence being a natural analogue for comparison.

Nonetheless, Francis disavows collaborations. “We're not really much into collaborations as a thing, per se,” she says. “It's just something that kind of every now and then should be quite nice. It's helpful to experiment with people, but… you sort-of have enough to do just writing your own music, it sort of feels like a more important thing to do: to write AlunaGeorge stuff than to collaborate. We have some collaborations in the pipeline… you never say never, but we haven't got anything planned at the moment,” she says. And the Disclosure track, apparently, was “a kind of happy accident, really. We did a couple of shows with Disclosure, we had chats backstage about the projects we were doing there and their new album and they were pretty much halfway through their new album tracks, they felt like they had their singles in the bag so we were kind of being pretty chilled, they invited me to the studio for a day. We just kind of ate some sandwiches and listened to some music and got down to some writing, and we pretty much finished it off mainly in a day, and then we had another day of recording the vocals where we put the finishing touches on the chorus, so yeah,” she concludes. How would Francis describe their own sound? “Complex, intricate beats, and sort-of slightly unusual sounds with kind-of old school songwriting; songs that you can sing back to yourself at the end of the day interwoven with that.

AlunaGeorge are accruing a reputation for workaholism, with Reid telling British newspaper The Evening Standard's David Smyth the duo spend more time together than with anyone else. Which in turn has lead to fairly insipid speculation the duo are romantically involved, because apparently in 2013 a man and a woman working together is somehow still a thing (The Observer titled a feature on AlunaGeorge A Musical Fling That Continues To Blossom). Reid has a girlfriend, Francis has a boyfriend. Still, as suggested in the corporeal title of the duo's debut record Body Music, sex is a big deal in the songwriting process. “When we were writing the album, we really wanted it to be an album that you could just turn on and play from start to finish, and for it to be able to take people to a different mood,” Francis explains. “And it's kind of... I don't know if you've read about how we've coined it as 'bedroom music' in a sense: whatever you're doing in your bedroom, from getting ready to go out to being kind of quiet and sad or having loads of mates back and turning your bedroom upside down, this should be a song for any one of those activities. It's got quite an intimate feeling,” she confirms.

Reid himself pinpoints where and when his half of the AlunaGeorge sound comes from; as he's pointed out in a half-dozen interviews, it follows Pharrell's groundbreaking work with The Neptunes to a T. It's hip hop minimalism demonstrated by the now hyphenless Jay Z's Magna Carta... Holy Grail (2013) to be in vogue, ten years since Justin Timberlake used it to validate he was more than just an ex-Mouseketeer castrato. Closer to home, AlunaGeorge are like a refracted reinterpretation of their contemporary Jessie Ware, whose underrated 2012 debut record Devotion reached a similar place by different means. Francis' vocals are harder to place – she's sharper and angrier than Florence, but not at all a rapper. A new decade's Lily Allen, without the emotional baggage.

At this, we discuss the internet as both a canvas and a labyrinth: the dead ends, pitfalls, surprises and inadvertent upsides it offers a mobile, global artist like Francis. Considering the duo ran second in BBC's Sound Of 2013 poll without having released an LP at the time, online hype has been their friend. “I didn't live in London, I didn't have any musicians around me at school. I'd get an idea in my head about making music and I had to go online and find people that were likeminded, doing things in a serious way,” says Francis. “You'd find people that were doing [music] as a hobby, but had no ambition. You can more easily follow people's ambition online because those were the ones that weren't just accepting just playing in their bedroom with their mates, they're more interested in finding likeminded people. And the only way for me to find that was to try on the internet,” she asserts.

“The internet is an excellent tool, and the job that it does is hard to define,” Francis says. “It has a weird way of looking like it's doing a lot more than it actually is, so as a band, if you've got a lot of hype online you have to be very, very aware that that means that hype is only online, and the challenge is yet to come where real people actually believe in you as a real artist that they can get their hands on, that they can come to the show and basically decide whether they trust you or not. That takes a lot longer than their initial wave of interest. You have to almost not believe it until it becomes solid and consistent in reality.” Francis is certainly grounded, and her perspective would do much to defuse the nuclear hype behind online debutants Azealia Banks and Iggy Azealia.