How Kristin Welchez "Kind Of Outgrew" Dum Dum Girls

Esteemed Californian rock band Dum Dum Girls started out as a bedroom-project for Kristin Welchez late-last decade before morphing into a full band to tour their garage-tinged 2010 debut I Will Be. They built an instant following and went from strength to strength in the next few years, but by the time their more pop-focussed third album Too True (2014) arrived (on which Welchez, known as Dee Dee in the band, played and sang everything herself) she was tiring of the arbitrary boundaries placed on her by the band construct.

Ultimately the experience surrounding Too True — and its reception by fans and pundits — not only formed a sonic bridge to the diverse array of dance and pop sensibilities found on new project Kristin Kontrol's debut album X-Communicate, it also helped persuade her to take the solo plunge.

"I just started feeling a bit pinned down by the sound that the band had really solidified over eight-plus years of records and touring."

"I basically started writing for [X-Communicate] in January of 2015, and it wasn't for Kristin Kontrol it was for whatever the next thing I was doing, presumably the fourth Dum Dum Girls full-length," Welchez recalls. "After a year of touring Too True I think I was taking a close look as to how that record did and how touring it did — or did not — compare to what I was expecting. I think that I recognised that even trying to take a minor departure from the anticipated Dum Dum Girls template didn't go over quite like I thought it would. 

"I just started feeling a bit pinned down by the sound that the band had really solidified over eight-plus years of records and touring, so it [was] really just a matter of deciding that I didn't want to worry about that when I was starting to write, that I would just write whatever I felt like writing and make the record that I wanted to make and not worry about how it was going to play out: just figure it out after when I had it done and knew what I had. Because I also didn't totally know what I was doing, I just knew I didn't want to make what people would expect the next Dum Dum Girls record to be.

"It's funny because I obviously love and loved that band — it was almost a decade of my life and I'm proud of the records that we put out and the tours that we did — but I just kind of outgrew it and I wanted to have the freedom to do whatever it was I felt like doing and not having to worry about how it would get funnelled back through the context of Dum Dum Girls."

And there's much more to X-Communicate than just '80s dance music, with flourishes of everything from motorik to reggae in the mix.

"I assume that the record will get overwhelmingly pegged as some sort of dance-pop or synth-pop record," Welchez smiles, "and I was very much trying to make more classically-referencing dance music, but it wasn't just, like, 'Oh, I'm trading in the guitar for the synth and I'm trading in the '70s for the '80s'. No, I just wanted to touch on all of the things that I love."