Juliana Huxtable takes what some might call an intense approach to DJing. She’s known to use four decks, allowing her to mix and match components from up to four different tracks at once. But last year, when Huxtable dropped deBasement’s “F.F.F.T.DJ” during her set at Honcho, a campout electronic music festival in the wilderness outside Pittsburgh, she cut out almost all the noise and, for over a minute, just let it ride. In purely practical terms, this was prudent. A rework of an earlier single called “FTDJ (Thank God),” “F.F.F.T.DJ” is a dancefloor apex predator, liable to gobble up all the other frequencies in the mix.
When did deBasement melt your brain? If you don’t have an answer to that question, close this window, go throw on their new EP HARDBODY (it’ll only take 23 minutes) and then come back here. It happened to me last month, at Primavera Sound in Barcelona. There, at three in the morning on one of the festival’s side stages, I watched Alli Logout morph into a ballroom emcee-cum-revolutionary firebrand-cum-feral cat, hissing and yowling and dangling their microphone from their crotch. Behind them, manning the decks, was Margo XS, unflappable in her wraparound shades. I remember stumbling back towards my hotel, drunk—mostly, though not exclusively—off that mind-liquefying bass.
“It’s loud, that’s for sure,” Margo demurs to me a few weeks later, taking our video call from her sun-dappled home studio in Los Angeles’ Elysian Heights neighborhood. “On dance music, you can really have something that is massive, one sound that is bigger than anything else because it’s the only sound.” I picture what the waveform of HARDBODY’s title track must look like when the beat drops—imposing, to say the least—as Logout comes out swinging, “I could-I could-I could-I could give a fuck about the feds, give a fuck about the cops.”
“With deBasement, we wanted to bring more energy to the club space which has been becoming increasingly more stale over the years,” Logout tells me via email. “By coming back to the drawing board and exploring the dynamic between selector and MC, we saw a great need for that energy to come back to the club but have done so in a very hyper and dramatic way.”
Margo’s leftist politics and her taste for synths that sound like air raid sirens might seem at odds with her day job: making hits for pop stars. Over the past year, the Michigan-born producer has had a hand in several of the genre’s pacesetting albums, working on both the original and remixed versions of Zara Larsson’s Grammy-nominated Midnight Sun, as well as executive producing Kim Petras’ Detour. (That tidbit from a New York Times profile about Zara listening to Arca in the studio—Margo’s doing.) She prides herself on being a rogue element in the capitalist machine, wielding dopamine-laced hooks to convert every listener into a potential sleeper agent.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Pitchfork: “deBasement, the hottest band in the whole UK right now,” and yet you and Alli are both based in L.A. How’s that work?
Margo XS: It’s an inside joke that’s become a tag now. Alli and I went to Mexico to write the first EP, and Alli was there working on a movie with her amazing friend Isabelle. She’s British and has a very thick, posh British accent. We were having her say stuff on top of the track [“NO THOughTS”], and then we kept recycling that tag. It’s also a bit of an homage to our love for the history of rave music in the UK.
