The band members, all in their early 30s, spoke with Spectrum in New York a day ahead of the festival. Rufus fans – who have collectively streamed their music nearly a billion times – are passionate, loyal and enraptured to see the trio playing live for the first time in 18 months. The band only released its latest single, the dark, swaggering On My Knees, this same day, but you wouldn’t know it from the audience’s response to the new tunes. Rufus Du Sol received two Grammy nominations in 2020. Their 75-minute set plays like one long continuous mix, loaded with their best-loved tracks plus a few from their imminent fourth album, Surrender. Some barely dressed fans seem oblivious to the night chill as they skip towards the stage, the first chords from Rufus’ Grammy-nominated 2018 track Underwater pealing into the night air.Ītop three tall white blocks and in front of huge monochromatic projections of themselves, singer Tyrone Lindqvist, keys/synths player Jon George and drummer James Hunt, all clad in black, look more like rock stars than a dance music act.
The indie-dance band was second only to Eilish on today’s bill and the crowd that’s assembled before their stage is testament to their huge following in the country they’ve called home for the past three years. On a Friday evening in New York in late September, two acts are yet to take the stage on day one of Governors Ball Music Festival: teen sensation and headliner Billie Eilish, and Rufus Du Sol, “Sydney’s finest three-piece” according to BBC1 Radio host Pete Tong. It’s so sad they couldn’t do it but we donated to their school and ended up going with a choir in Los Angeles which was such a beautiful experience to see them singing it.Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size “We had this children’s choir in Melbourne all set up to go but the day before they were booked to sing, Melbourne went down into lockdown again. “Obviously with Tyrone becoming a new father, during the process of making the record we started talking about having a children’s choir in there both to capture that sense of new innocence but also of us kind of washing ourselves clean of the past,” George says. With added children’s choir on the single Next To Me. Musically, it remains quintessentially Rufus, straddling the electronic pop spectrum from darker soundscapes to euphoric melodic release. Three years later, Surrender is a far more romantic record in the wake of the Rufus du Sol singer marrying his partner Malorie and welcoming their son Ziggy. Solace was a darker musical affair, the lyrics heavily weighted by Lindqvist’s emotional turmoil after a break-up.