Pendulum On ‘Elemental’ And The Death Of EDM
“As soon as the Chainsmokers hi-fived J.Lo on 'American Idol', that scene was dead."
Late last February, Rob Swire and Gareth McGrillen made a brief stop in Mexico City for dance music’s massive Electric Daisy Carnival. The festival, which drew over 100,000 attendees to a giant race track each night, epitomised overblown pre-COVID raving.
After their set as Knife Party on the bass-focused Circuit Grounds stage, Swire and McGrillen hopped a flight back to their adopted home of London. Swire recalls hearing coughing in the cabin and wondering idly if it might be that mystery virus on the news. Two weeks later, no one was jetsetting overseas for a one-hour DJ set.
For many in dance music, the pandemic came as a rude shock. As touring schedules dissolved, DJ-producers everywhere fretted about their futures. Not so the duo behind Pendulum and Knife Party. In fact, Swire and McGrillen breathed a shared sign of relief. “The first six months of not having to travel was incredible,” McGrillen says. “Aside from the worries of becoming mortally ill.”
“And money,” Swire chips in wryly, before seconding his bandmate’s lockdown optimism: “If it was up to me, I’d spend as much time in the studio as I possibly could.” With no gigs to rush off to, the pair could finally recommit to Pendulum, the project that started it all.
An Elemental Return
I’ve connected with Swire and McGrillen on Zoom just as Covid restrictions are easing in the UK. It’s late on a Monday night in London, and Swire cagily reports he’s in the studio working on “pop production stuff” for an unnamed artist. The subject of our call is Pendulum’s new four-track EP, Elemental — their first body of work since 2010’s Immersion album. (The band’s other original member, Paul ‘El Hornet’ Harding, lives in their hometown of Perth.) Swire and McGrillen are exactly as I remember them from interviews in years past: droll and guarded at first, but willing to warm up with a little coercion.
We begin by recalling the pair’s ill-fated trip home last New Year’s Eve. Pendulum was booked for a ‘Trinity’ DJ set at Perth’s Origin Fields, and Swire and McGrillen spent two weeks in Australian quarantine to be ready. (Harding, according to McGrillen, “just drove five minutes up the road”.) Days before the event, COVID pulled the pin on Origin Fields. While Pendulum managed to cobble together a club show, the UK members had come a very long way to be disappointed. After that trip, they stayed put in London, putting a final polish on their new music.
Elemental hits all the familiar Pendulum pleasure centres. ‘Driver’, the EP’s scene-setter, would’ve been at home on the band’s 2005 debut album, Hold Your Colour.
“We had all these tracks ready for a show coming up,” Swire says. “I thought, as much as I love these new tracks, we can’t open with a single one of these fucking things. They’re not a Pendulum show opener.”
“We can’t open with a single one of these fucking things. They’re not a Pendulum show opener.”
‘Driver’ was made to do that job. The middle tracks — ‘Nothing for Free’ and ‘Louder Than Words’ (a collaboration with UK bass duo Hybrid Minds) — find Swire back on the mic, right where Immersion left off.
If ‘Driver’ is a ready-made set opener, ‘Come Alive’ feels like the encore closer. A riot of crunching guitar and ‘90s rave keys, it’s a combination only Pendulum would make. “I used to be in this band called Conditions Apply,” Swire explains. “The drummer from that band got into a car accident and passed away. A bunch of the band members were coming down to a [Pendulum] show in Melbourne, so as a tribute we covered one of the band’s goth/industrial tracks that night. We listened to the sound after and were like, Jesus…”
“It was fucking sick,” McGrillen interjects.
“Yeah, it was an interesting vibe, us doing that sound,” Swire adds. “So ‘Come Alive’ was born out of that.”
How Pendulum Swung Back
The full-throttle return of Pendulum was never a sure thing. In 2014, Swire and McGrillen conducted a typically acid-dipped Reddit AMA to promote Knife Party’s debut album, Abandon Ship.
Asked by a Redditor about the status of new Pendulum music, Swire hosed down any hope. “Around about the time we started Knife Party, I really lost my heart for the [Pendulum] project,” he wrote.
The breaking point apparently came when Swire watched TV coverage of the band’s set on the Glastonbury main stage in 2011. Immersion had peaked at No. 1 on the UK Album Charts, earning Pendulum the warm-up slot for Beyoncé. On Reddit, Swire recalled the blank faces staring back at them from the crowd. “I just didn’t like anything about it,” he wrote. Luckily for Swire and McGrillen, though, their EDM lark Knife Party was blowing up.
The seeds for Pendulum’s comeback were planted at Miami’s Ultra Music Festival in March 2016. Adam Russakoff, the festival’s talent buyer and an avowed drum & bass fan, promised Pendulum the closing slot on the main stage if they’d reunite. It was too ballsy an offer to turn down. The set took a lot of planning, beginning with a Knife Party DJ set before the stage flipped to reveal the Pendulum band members at their instruments.
I happened to be there that night covering the festival and was struck by the strangeness of a live band coming after an all-day onslaught of EDM DJs. Even with special guests like Deadmau5 and Tom Morello, the set sounded nothing like the high-sheen sound from Zedd and David Guetta’s USBs. For the band members, it was all a blur. “It was too much stress to plan both sets at once – it nearly killed us,” Swire recalls.
It was also surreal that Pendulum, an act that never found much traction in the US, had ended up headlining its biggest dance festival. “Knife Party is our only act that’s ever done any damage in the States,” Swire agrees. “Pendulum was always a bit of a weird one, because they do not like drum & bass [in the US]. It connected in pockets and in a cult sense, but not like it connected in the UK or Australia.”
That said, Pendulum hasn’t felt part of a drum & bass ‘scene’ since the mid-2000s. The band’s love of heavy metal dynamics has more in common with Muse and Tool than LTJ Bukem and Roni Size. “I feel like people keep trying to make us part of the scene,” Swire sighs. “I feel like [Pendulum] is its own thing, and that’s the way I prefer thinking about it.”
Dance Music After EDM
Pendulum may not belong to drum & bass, but Knife Party was no more at ease in the candy-coloured world of EDM. The project coincided with America’s dance festivals hitting peak hysteria, and tracks like ‘Internet Friends’, ‘Bonfire’ and ‘Antidote’ (a collaboration with sugary anthem-makers Swedish House Mafia) found their people. Somehow, though, Swire and McGrillen observed it all with amused detachment, like the two cynical metalheads in a classroom of love heart-doodling drama kids.
“We definitely feel like outsiders, but with Knife Party we intentionally made ourselves outsiders,” Swire explains. “The whole scene could get a bit full of itself and cheesy. At least 50 percent of [Knife Party] was a pisstake.” Do they think Knife Party fans perceived the duo’s buzzsaw sounds as a pisstake? “You’d hope so,” McGrillen says, “but I have a strange feeling some people didn’t get it.”
Knife Party rode the crest of the EDM wave, however ironically, but the duo agree the bubble burst some time around 2014. “As soon as the Chainsmokers hi-fived J.Lo on American Idol, that scene was dead,” Swire deadpans.
Despite all that, the producers are itching to return to Knife Party. “I always like when you don’t know where to take something,” Swire says. “That’s definitely the case with Knife Party, and it’s definitely the case that no one in electronic music knows what the fuck to do anymore.”
“The whole scene could get a bit full of itself and cheesy. At least 50 percent of [Knife Party] was a pisstake.”
After I prod for more on that topic, the guys turn to dance music’s big-tent prospects post-pandemic. “For a while there, it was kind of an arms race,” Swire says. “Everyone was trying to do heavier tunes than the next guy, and it just ended up as noisy dubstep.”
“It’s going to be interesting to see what state EDM is in when everything opens up again — and if anything has moved forward sonically,” McGrillen adds.
“There’s also the fact that towards the tail-end of EDM being massive, there was a weird disconnect,” Swire continues. “When Skrillex and Knife Party were first coming out with stuff, people were actually listening to that music at home. ‘Bangarang’ and ‘Internet Friends’ were played on the radio. When that shit all wrapped up, people were listening to that shit at events, but not at home.”
“We’d be in a vehicle transport taking us from the festival, hearing people in their cars playing more chilled versions of EDM,” McGrillen says. “That’s how guys like Illenium came up. People were listening to him in situations outside of the rave, after they’d just had their heads machine-gunned by dubstep for 17 hours.”
(For what it’s worth, the guys can’t tell where rock music is going either. “It’s struggling for relevance,” Swire shrugs. “The pop-punk thing seems promising at the moment.”)
The core Pendulum trio is booked for ‘Trinity’ DJ shows this summer, with hopes to bring the full band back in 2022. Swire and McGrillen were waiting until Elemental dropped to start working on Knife Party again.
Given all we’ve discussed, I’m curious if they have any idea how it’ll sound. “It’s a tough one,” McGrillen deflects, but Swire is ready with a line. “Something dark and fucking noisy,” he wagers. “The great thing about Pendulum is you have to write songs, and the great thing about Knife Party is you don’t have to at all.”
Jack Tregoning is a freelance writer based in Sydney — he was formerly the Editorial Director at Beatport and editor of inthemix. Find him on Twitter.