The Dø

Parisian indie-pop duo The Dø (whose name is pronounced ‘dough’) is forever listed as a ‘French-Finnish’ band. It’s a national duality wholly contained within their singer, Olivia Merilahti, who grew up in the Paris suburbs with a French father and a Finnish mother. “This double culture has always been there, through my life,” says Merilahti. “I’m really thankful my mum spoke Finnish with us, we had this secret language that we could speak in front of anyone else. And it made it easier to learn other languages, and I associate this thing with languages with music... I grew up listening to music in English, and I loved opening CD booklets and learning all the lyrics. So it was really natural for me to start writing [my own songs] in English. There was never any other option. And it meant I didn’t have to choose between Finnish and French. I could think of them like this: my intimate language was Finnish, my everyday language was French, and my musical language was English.”

Shake Shook Shaken, whose thumping electronic pop marks a stark change from 2011’s oddball Both Ways Open Jaws, drew influence from French contemporaries Daft Punk, Gesaffelstein and Brodinski. “Because you’re so sensitive to what you hear, we never allowed ourselves to do listen to something contemporary when making [an album] before. With the first two albums, we played jazz and modern classical, something that had nothing to do with what we were doing. This time, we listened to pop music, hip hop, electronic music.”

The music they were making stood in stark contrast to where they recorded it: in an 18th century water tower in the French countryside. While they were making the album, multi-instrumentalist/producer Dan Levy stayed in the studio, while Merilahti took periodic breaks. “I was driving back-and-forth between Paris and the countryside,” she recalls, “and whilst I was driving I’d listen to songs we were recording, and it was important to me that they sounded good in the car, on the highway. I think we wanted a highway-friendly album.”

With the release of Shake Shook Shaken, The Dø will return to the road, including a long-awaited return to Australia. Merilahti is sure they’ll have to reintroduce themselves to locals all over, but admits she feels that way with each new LP. “We feel like we have to win the audience over again every time,” she says. “When we do the music, it’s just the two of us in the studio, and we remove ourselves from civilisation for such a long time. It’s so difficult to make music, and sometimes you don’t know what you do it, why you put yourself through it. And there’s always this nagging question, no matter how popular you are, of whether people are going to care about what you’re making, and who’s going to actually want to listen to it. But you can be gone for so long and yet, when you come out of hibernation, there’s always people just there, waiting for you.”