Tropical Pop

We’re excited to play for Miley’s people, for her Bangerz,” laughs Jimmy Giannopoulos, one-third of New York trio Lolawolf, who’ve just been tabbed to open for Miley Cyrus on her Australian tour. The band is fronted by their own child-of-celebrity, Zoë Kravitz – her father is Lenny, her mother Lisa Bonet – and features Giannopolous and James Levy, both members of the Julian Casablancas-approved electro-pop outfit Reputante. Yet the band identifies not with the stadium shows they’ve suddenly found themselves playing – “We’re totally in shock that we’re doing these tours,” Kravitz admits, on the road opening for Lily Allen – but with those shows they’ve played in the year prior, to “50 to 100 people (in) DIY venues in New York.”

Lolawolf were “born out of boredom and bad weather,” the trio first jamming on a rainy Brooklyn day in 2013. Their self-titled debut EP was released early this year, and now comes their debut LP, Calm Down, its title inspired by the “chill vibes” in the air when Lolawolf rolled tape in the Bahamas. That locale may conjure Compass Point Studios and its beacons of gleaming turn-of-the-’80s production (Roxy Music, ELO, Tom Tom Club, Talking Heads et al), but whilst Kravitz actually spent long childhood stints at Compass Point when her dad recorded there, her own reasons for recording in the Bahamas were simpler: her grandmother’s half-Bahamian and her family has a house there. “When I’m there I feel like I can put down my phone and just detach from all the noise and the distraction,” says Kravitz.

“We’re totally in shock that we’re doing these tours.”

Kravitz thinks there’s a definite “tropical sound” at play on Calm Down, but what’s most striking is how minimal Lolawolf’s midtempo music is. “If you listen to the early productions that Timbaland did for Aaliyah, or those early Neptunes productions, that music is still some of the best shit I’ve ever heard,” says Kravitz. “Minimalism was definitely the approach,” Giannopoulos adds. “We wanted to get our point across without the clutter, to strip everything down as much as we could.”

That led the band to studying one of pop music’s definitive pieces of propulsive minimalism: Snoop Dogg’s Neptunes-produced 2004 classic, Drop It Like It’s Hot. “That was right when that really minimal hip hop production was at its peak and right when it was crossing over into pop music, and you had The Neptunes doing Slave 4 U for Britney Spears,” Kravitz enthuses.

“I actually found that track on Spotify, and looked up the instrumental version, specifically, to see exactly what they were doing,” Giannopoulos explains. “Like, it already sounds minimal as it is, but when you take away the double-time vocals, listening to the instrumental, it’s staggering just how little music is actually there, how much the song consists of space, of just air.”