Over the course of 12 years and four albums, Melbourne's Cut Copy have set the standard for combining indie-rock melodicism and dance-music energy, earning a thriving international fan base, and full-on rock-star status in Australia, as a result. Recently the band released Free Your Mind, a set of 14 neon-streaked songs that give off a unique kind of sci-fi utopian appeal that helps make it their best LP yet. We got frontman Dan Whitford on the phone to explain the album and share some of the music that inspired it, which we think will inspire you.

Listen to Dan Whitford's Playlist on Esquire Spotify or scroll down

ESQUIRE.COM: The mood of Cut Copy's music has always had a brightness that other acts around you in the dance-music world don't share, and it seems to come through even stronger on this one.

DAN WHITFORD: Yeah, I think our music is usually fairly uplifting. Free Your Mind is almost a turbo version of Cut Copy in that respect. Maybe that's just because I've been listening to so much music of a similar vein, sort of older house music and UK dance music that really has that sense of freedom and euphoria.

ESQ: I hear a lot of the Madchester sound in there, which had a kind of revolutionary psychedelic streak.

DW: Definitely. And I think that's part of what's exciting about that period, aside from being musically cool. I think that's a period where music transcended that idea of being just pop culture and has actually made the world a better place. Whether that's just music or some greater cultural shift or people just doing the right drugs, I don't know.

ESQ: People tend to look down on dance music as just something for people to take drugs and act stupid to, but it really has had a much deeper impact.

DW: What was cool to me about the acid-house scene is that it made all of these cultural distinctions irrelevant. It was just people coming together to enjoy music and be in the same place, and the idea of coming together is very key, I think, not only to our record but to dance music in general.

ESQ: Tell me about the billboards that you put up to promote Free Your Mind. People had to actually go to them in order to stream a new single.

DW: In the lead-up to this record we kind of noticed that the way music's coming out is kind of uninspiring. It's all available on the Internet so you don't really have to do much to find new music. So we tried to focus on doing things that were happening outside of the Internet that could draw people into the ideas we had for this record. For me, the essence of the billboard idea was getting people to make a pilgrimage to a remote place to listen to the new track. We thought the cool way of doing it would be to create these billboards with just "Free Your Mind" written on them, and no other information, in these really remote, strange places around the world so people would have to seek them out — in between some mountains in Chile, outback Australia, one in this really bad neighborhood in Detroit. We thought that you could just sit there and listen to the track and have bit of a spiritual experience. You're looking at this billboard that says "Free Your Mind," listening to the audio, kind of in this weird place you're not usually in. We thought there was something poetic about that. A lot of people made the journey, and hopefully felt rewarded for having done it.

ESQ: It's almost like the billboards were a piece of art themselves.

DW: I guess we found them interesting. If we'd heard of someone else doing this we'd be like, wow, that's pretty cool.

CUT COPY'S PLAYLIST

Orbital, "Chime"

"One of the first big UK acid-house hits. It's one of those club tracks that works brilliantly on the dancefloor, but could never have been made by a classically trained musician. We've always been inspired by the DIY spirit of early dance music."

KLF, "Last Train to Trancentral"

"The KLF are gods as far as I'm concerned. They took the energy of the acid-house scene and injected their punk attitude and weird mythology to create an irrepressible stadium-sized album called The White Room. It still stands as an all-time favorite."

Happy Mondays, "Hallelujah (Club Mix)"

"The Happy Mondays were one of Manchester's biggest bands through the late '80s and early '90s. Their baggy, swaggering jams are irresistibly danceable."

Spiritualized, "Any Way That You Want Me"

"I love the simplicity of a lot of Spiritualized's material. He writes songs like futuristic hymns, that slowly unfold to an ecstatic climax, and this is one of my favorites."

John Talabot, "So Will Be Now (feat. Pional)"

"The John Talabot record from 2012 was on constant rotation for the whole time we were making our new album. It's a perfect distillation of current club music but also references a wide range of music."

Brian Eno, "Deep Blue Day"

"Eno has been a constant influence on all of our records. Throughout the making of Free Your Mind we spent half our time doing extended ambient jams, in an effort to keep the process open. A lot of them ended up reminding me of Eno's ambient pieces."



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