“From Whiskey To Ginger Shots”: How RÜFÜS DU SOL Healed

There’s an eerie calm that lingers at the beginning of a RÜFÜS DU SOL show. A single flickering synth has the ability to put thousands of festival-goers into a trance, waiting for that first beat.

In a decade, the Australian trio have become known for their emotionally dense live shows, tugging at you with pulsating beats and euphoric vocals, feeding on the communal energy of a festival setting.

Returning to a festival stage for the first time since the pandemic, the silence is palpable as the three shadows that make up RÜFÜS DU SOL’ descend onto the stage at New York’s Governors Ball. The haunting intro synth of Solace favourite ‘Underwater’ hovers before the lights lift and the beat drops. It feels like the band has never left, quickly stepping back into their roles as heartstring puppeteers. The emotion swells once again as the crowd get louder and louder with each blaring synth.

The band may be brimming with the same razor-tight precision that made them worldwide festival mainstays, but this isn’t the same band. As the new material from their fourth album Surrender reveals, this is a far more composed and present RÜFÜS DU SOL — like they’ve taken a deep breath in and this return is the exhale.

Finding Peace In A Locked Down Joshua Tree

In a Manhattan hotel the day before the show, keyboardist Jon George tells me: “This record feels like a moment of healing. [With] Solace there was a lack of everything — responsibilities, self-care. It was a wild process and we lost ourselves in it.”

It will come as no surprise that 2020 was meant to be a very different year for the trio. They had tour dates planned and amongst that hoped to start work on their fourth album. As the world shut down, however, the touring stopped shifting their attention inwards. A planned two weeks in the sparse landscape of California’s Joshua Tree turned into eight weeks as the lockdown continued. Out there in the silence, the band began to re-evaluate the way RÜFÜS DU SOL had been operating.

“As terrible as [lockdown] was. It was a blessing in disguise for us,” says drummer James Hunt. “It allowed us to reconnect and revitalise the way we’ve been writing. In the past, we’ve written with no structure and there was a lack of self-care. It was a beautiful time to reassess that.”

“Our self-care and our ability to connect with our own responsibilities…it was a bit of chaos. It was really exciting but really chaotic and exhaustive.”

For the past decade, RÜFÜS DU SOL have been on the road, lapping up each opportunity as the stages got bigger and bigger. They became one of Australia’s most prized local bands before taking on the globe. Their third album Surrender took things to a new height with the band up the pointy end of nearly every festival in North America. They offered something different to a post-EDM US festival climate, bringing live music to an electronic scene that had been dominated by theatrical DJ performances. The rise was sharp and it began to get blurry for the boys.

“It was all moving faster and faster,” says frontman Tyrone Lindqvist, as Jon and James nod, agreeing.

“More shows, less time to write. The balance was not there. Our self-care and our ability to connect with our own responsibilities…it was a bit of chaos. It was really exciting but really chaotic and exhaustive. I felt really run down towards the end and it was a miracle to have a pause button pushed.”

They may describe it as a pause but it sounds more like a restart. During their time in Joshua Tree, they began to focus on self-care. The mornings would begin with meditation, a workout, a sauna, and a cold plunge. The music would then follow. They began writing songs that were weightier and heavier but over time they became hopeful and then innocent and euphoric.

That story is told on Surrender. Dark and desperate moments like ‘On My Knees’ sit alongside washes of rejuvenation like ‘Alive’. Surrender is as high-octane as any RÜFÜS DU SOL record but there’s a steadiness to it. Euphoria is not offered straight-up. You wade through the emotional denseness of ‘I Don’t Wanna Leave’ and ‘Wildfire’ before relief is finally offered.

That desire to repair is the emotional backbone of the record.

The title track is a glorious exhale. An arrival at peace told through the imagery of rain washing them clean. “Rain begins to fall, dust fills the air, life begins to form, water, healing,” sings Lindqvist as the beat steadily builds and then explodes. It’s a climax seven tracks in the making and it’s every bit as good as it sounds.

Surrendering And Starting New

Surrender revolves around healing and a yearning for connection. This record gave the band a chance to “repair the damage we did to ourselves, to our friendships,” as George puts it. That desire to repair is the emotional backbone of the record. “I want you to hold me…come home,” Lindqvist sings on ‘Wildfire’ while on opener ‘Next To Me’ he declares, “When the lights go down, I want to feel you standing next to me.” Although they were isolated, the band reconnected with family back home, able to give them more time than ever on the phone. It also revived their camaraderie as friends and a band.

By album close, there’s an unmistakable sense that they were able to find the re-connection they were searching for. “As long as I’m alive, I’ll never let you go,” sings Lindqvist as the beat rattles the chest. It’s the rousing closer that has become one of RÜFÜS DU SOL’ hallmarks. At over seven-minutes long, it’s clear that the band understands how important the finale is to their fans now.

It’s an emotional sucker-punch delivered by a band who know exactly what they’re doing by waiting until the dying moments to unveil it.

They’ve been serving up lengthy, expansive album closers since their debut, kicking into gear with 2017’s ‘Innerbloom’. The song was voted by triple j listeners as the fifth-best song of the 2010s and it remains the giddy high point of their sets. “‘Innerbloom was such a special song to write and it came out so fluidly,” says Lindqvist. It’s like emotional improvisation, allowing it all to come out without any time constraints or structural boundaries.

That same sort of fluidity presents itself on Surrender closer ‘Always’. It’s an emotional sucker-punch delivered by a band who know exactly what they’re doing by waiting until the dying moments to unveil it. “There was no debate [about the final song] this time. We wrote the song with the intention of it being the final song,” says Hunt.

It’s interesting to note that while Solace ended on the lyric, “It’s time to say goodbye,” Surrender concludes with, “Trust that I have changed. I’m never leaving.” That’s where the difference between the two records exists. They are committed to change on Surrender and energised by the prospect of it.

RÜFÜS DU SOL are now re-entering the very circumstances that they hit pause on when the pandemic hit. Earlier this year, they returned to the stage for the first time at Red Rocks Amphitheatre — a mind-boggling natural venue in Colorado that’s the perfect backdrop for their expansive electronica. They played the venue two years prior while touring Solace but under very different circumstances.

“We’ve been saying: from whiskey shots to ginger shots,” the band recounts amidst laughter as they describe their new pre-show ritual. For their first shows, they invited their personal trainer who doubles as “a spiritual zen master”, according to Hunt. He helped them find healthy places to eat, led them in breathwork, and set up ice baths to help the band come down from the adrenalin of their shows.

For more than 10 years, RÜFÜS DU SOL have been creating euphoria across the world but it’s the return to calm that seems to have gifted them the most peace. Surrender is a confident, mature record — vulnerable yet assured. It’s not a record made amidst chaos and as a result, there’s a different energy surrounding them.

On-stage in New York, as a raucous crowd adjusts to a festival once again, RÜFÜS DU SOL cut a calm presence atop three separate platforms. In moments where the silence lingers, they look at each other, flashing a smile. Refreshed and revitalised, it’s RÜFÜS DU SOL in their prime.