Daphni is the project of Dan Snaith aka Caribou, who recently released his LP Butterfly via Jiaolong, his first Daphni album since 2022’s Cherry. Along with the announcement, the artist has announced live dates including an 8-hour DJ set at Nowadays, New York City on March 13 and a headline appearance at Bass Coast in Vancouver this July marking his festival debut.

Dan Snaith on Butterfly:

“Daphni music is still music that I’m making primarily for the purpose of playing in my DJ sets. The majority of the tracks on this record I do play regularly in my sets. But then there are a bunch – slower, weirder – that I don’t usually play… or wait… maybe the point is that I’d only play them in the right club.”

One such club is a good microcosm for the ethos of Butterfly as a whole. “Around the time I was finishing up this album I played a long set in a club called Open Ground in Wuppertal, Germany.” Snaith recalls, “It’s kind of, in one sense, the platonic ideal of the kind of club I’d want to play in. Every single decision has been taken, at great expense, with the aim of making the perfect sounding medium sized club room. But on top of it being the perfect acoustic environment it also is run by an amazing collection of people in a way that gives it a sense of community that dance music at its best provides. It is an absolute pleasure to play in that room to a crowd of people who come from all over. Playing in there you feel like you can play anything, and I played works in progress of pretty much every track on this album in my set there. Don’t get me wrong, I love playing a short set at a festival or in a more raw warehouse kind of club where you bang it out and only really functional music works but on record I guess the point of these Daphni records is to keep in mind a more expansive idea of dance music where the parameters are broad and the church is broad. I think that actually putting really functional stuff next to weirder tracks (both on an album and in a dj set) might be the thing that’s still most interesting to me.”

Daphni
Butterfly
tracklist
Jiaolong

1. Sad Piano House
2. Clap Your Hands
3. Hang
4. Lucky
5. Waiting So Long
6. Napoleon’s Rock
7. Good Night Baby
8. Talk To Me
9. Two Maps
10. Josephine
11. Miles Smiths
12. Goldie
13. Caterpillar
14. Shifty
15. Invention
16. Eleven

Order Butterfly by Daphni HERE