Röyksopp Q&A

Your new album Junior recently dropped in the UK after a four year gap. Has it taken you four years to put together this new album or have you been doing too much partying and not enough work? Well it took us four days to make the album, the thing is that people would say that we did sloppy work so we wasted four years and then we made it.

Tell us about ‘Junior’ and the ideas behind it The album is part of the whole concept of the Junior/Senior duality in people. The aggressiveness, energetic and shyness which we’ve tried to express so well on Junior. During these four years we worked on ‘Junior’ and ‘Senior’ and flipped it around. Junior is the first part of whole and we have another album [Senior] coming out this winter.

Can you give us any gossip on the new album, what we can expect and any guest vocalists? It’s not an album consisting of pop songs it’s a complete album that we feel benefits if you take your time. Although we know it’s a bit blue eyed or naïve to think that people these days will listen to an album from A-Z, but that’s what we believe in.

New single ‘Girl And The Robot’ (feat. Robyn) is another classic. What’s the idea behind this track? We like to think that this can be interpret in both a literal sense and it can also be a metaphor for how relationships work in terms of someone who is so much in love with their work that it really effects their relationship. The word robot stands for worker.

How did you and Sven meet and get together? We met at a mutual friend’s house when we were 12 and 13. We met through the love of electronic music. Sven was playing a video game on a very old PC. It wasn’t just music it was video games, films and literature. We just shared a lot of ideas and became instant friends immediately.

Where does the name Röyksopp come from? It means literally puffball, which is the name of a fungus. It’s a kind of fungus that when you step on it, it spores in a cloud of dust. In Norwegian if you divide the word into two it means ‘smoke mushroom’ and so another translation in English would be mushroom cloud. We just thought that these two things, it could also be an insane, tongue in cheek over the top drug reference, smoke and mushroom. So this name meant so much, like cake with meatballs soaked in soda and sugar so it was just too much and we like over the top things.

Is it nice to be back on the road touring the album? It is extremely uplifting to see how many people are into our music, and shouldn’t be but are still surprised at how people remember us after we take so many years out.

Are you looking forward to playing at Get Loaded in the Park? Yes we are although we are intrigued and intimidated by the name.

When you’re in London what do you like to do to relax? Shopping, clubbing, we’ve been to all the major museums. I love the Natural History museum and the book stalls. It’s one of the things that really stands out, you can’t get your hands on in Norway, if you go to a bookstore for comics and books.