For a band whose music has a distinct nighttime feel, a festival slot can be tricky, threatening to undermine the entire vibe they’re working to evoke. So it is for Rüfüs Du Sol, whose electronic dance music offers a muted, cinematic pulse that sounds like blood pumping through the wee small hours. So if it seems like their slot at Boston Calling — 7:20 to 8:50 p.m. on Friday, with the sun setting at 8:11 – is too good to be a coincidence, that’s because it’s not.
“No, we definitely push for that slot a lot of the time,” says keyboardist Jon George. “My favorite sets to do are sunset, so you can get the best of both worlds. But either way, I think just being outdoors is our biggest preference. We have a lot of older material that was more sun-laden, and we would lean into that in a sunnier setting or daylight time.”
He adds, “It is really fun as it gets a bit more dark during our set and you can see the full lighting show. I feel like it just changes the mood halfway through the set.”
As it takes that penultimate Friday slot at the Harvard Athletic Complex, Rüfüs Du Sol is riding a slow but steady surge. Three of the band’s four albums topped the album chart in the group’s native Australia (2018′s “Solace” stalled at number two) and 11 of its singles have gone gold or platinum there. Meanwhile, on this side of the Pacific, “Alive” just won a Grammy for best dance/electronic recording. George is grateful for those successes but says that they’re not what motivates the group.
“We’re not trying to bend over backwards to accommodate a wider audience,” he says. “I think we always go in with the ethos of: If we like the music, we make it for ourselves first. And that seems to be a good recipe for what’s connecting with people.”
When the pandemic shutdown struck in 2020, it was the only recipe Rüfüs Du Sol had to work with. The band canceled its tour and isolated together in Joshua Tree, Calif. “It’s like another planet out there. It’s like Mars,” George says. “When there are sunsets there, all the stars are so bright and you do feel like you’re just somewhere else.”
It was there that George, guitarist and vocalist Tyrone Lindqvist, and drummer James Hunt began work on what would become 2021′s “Surrender” with no distractions and no expectations. “It was more interesting this time, with no real deadline, because everything was continually being pushed back for when the world would be open again,” George says. “We got into a really good routine there and were able to sort of shut out the world selfishly, a little bit, and focus on creating good work energy and for us to be able to get the best out of making music and falling in love with the process again.”
Even as the group finished up work in the more interconnected urban sprawl of Los Angeles, that sense of dislocation has been baked into Rüfüs Du Sol’s M.O. since the start, from working in far-flung locales like Berlin and London to the simple act of adding umlauts to its name to obscure its Australian origins. “We wanted to seem foreign when we were playing back in Sydney,” says George with a chuckle. ”And it sort of worked for us, in a way. A lot of people thought we were from a different country. And we didn’t have a lot of photos of ourselves out for the first few years, so we were able to lean into that a little bit.”
Similar factors came into play when it became necessary to amend the band’s name with the words “Du Sol” to differentiate it from funk icons Rufus, of Chaka Khan fame. “It just seemed to carry that idea of being familiar but foreign,” George says. “‘Du Sol’ means many things in different languages, but ‘of the sun’ seems to be the most prevalent interpretation. And I think that that leans into this idea of Rüfüs always being this foreign planet or island or something that is able to transport you again when you’re listening.”
Marc Hirsh can be reached at officialmarc@gmail.com or on Twitter @spacecitymarc