Caribou: Influences

Caribou: Influences

Caribou’s earliest records—made when Dan Snaith was still known as Manitoba—bore obvious traces of ’90s IDM acts like Aphex Twin and Boards of Canada. But, as he steadily expanded his sound, Snaith folded in elements of shoegaze, krautrock, cosmic jazz and hip-hop, hopscotching across lessons learned from acts from my bloody valentine to Can to Pharoah Sanders to The Pharcyde—sometimes within a single song. By 2024’s Honey, the artist’s sixth album as Caribou, he was also finding inspiration in a feeling: joy. “Honey is full of joy,” Snaith tells Apple Music. “The joy of still loving making music as much, or more than, I ever have, the joy of being with other people playing live music, DJing. It is influenced by a lot of music that has brought me joy over the years as well as when I was making it.” This playlist rounds up all of those touchstones, leading with the uplifting sounds that powered Honey. Expect tracks that “provided direct inspiration”—from “Pump Up the Volume” by M/A/R/R/S and James Holden’s “Idiot” (the Honey track “Volume” is “very much a result of sampling” both, says Snaith) to René & Angela’s “Just Friends”, sampled on “Climbing”. But here you’ll also find music that shaped the mood of the record, from the UKG vocals of T2’s “Heartbroken” (see Honey’s opening track “Broke My Heart”) alongside tracks by Daft Punk, Thelma Houston and Tahira Syed, who Snaith had “on in the kitchen when [he] was making dinner for [his] family”. “There are tracks here I’ve known almost my whole life, and there are tracks that I discovered in the last couple of years,” says Snaith. “I feel very lucky that music still holds the same magic for me as it has my whole life.”

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