Music

Kicking off the album’s proper back half is “Midnight”, a number that starts with spooky piano lines and yearning sax work, right before the vocal sample comes in during the drop to ask, “Why is everybody always pickin’ on me?” The song then explodes into a groovy beatscape, which Caravan Palace ride to a funky conclusion. Inspired by Chopin’s nocturnes, it has a different vibe than their previous work, and the inclusion of that sax line ultimately led to the full adoption of the baritone sax in their live sets.

The plunky, dreamy, downright glittery “Russian” would soon become another staple, taking clear melodic inspiration from tracks like “Do Your Thing” by UK beatmasters Basement Jaxx. Initially thought of as perhaps even too pop and not swing enough for the group, Caravan Palace plowed through recording, and even a fresh vocal take from Colotis brought the pop elements to the forefront. Payen made it his mission to Carvangalize this track, adding more unique sound plops along with a stride piano part recorded by then-pianist Paul-Marie Barbier. The result was a song that may have started in a different universe but ended firmly within that swing-pop wheelhouse.

Are you Mr. Beau or are you Shorty Jones? So rests the quixotic question at the center of “Wonda”, a synth-funk workout that asks the listener to do “the kinky thing”. Payen was aiming for a piano line not too unlike “Superstition” by Stevie Wonder, and a mere piano break wasn’t enough. This is a Caravan Palace original we’re talking about, so you know full well that a track like this ends best with a vibraphone-led outro. That plays directly into the more experimental and expressive back-half of , where there are fewer out-and-out bangers but instead striking moments of fluidity and wonder (or wonda?).

“Human Leather Shoes for Crocodile Dandies” unquestionably wins the award for most distinct song title, but the melodic contents are even more intriguing. A loose and limber guitar loop swings in and out of samples, hovering over atmospheric passages and using sampled vocals to ask what’s the use of jivin’. At around 2:48, the song shifts into a looped, ambient phrase that feels almost Jon Hopkins-esque before reuniting with the central melodic theme, creating an experience that’s as empathetic as it is quietly grandiose, like a close friend telling a big secret.

That reverb-soaked bridge was created entirely by Toustou as Caravan Palace recount, and no one is quite sure how he did it. They have even referred to such sonic wizardry as nothing short of legendary.

Payen was the chief architect of the closer “Lay Down”, and the band have often referred to his songwriting practice as akin to a mad scientist tinkering. Using chopped-and-spliced vocals, the song depicts how the narrator can’t get sick and lie down, for they know their soul is bound for hell. Caravan Palace talk about how the production changes significantly during development: most of the original percussive elements were removed. The “Charles choir” of vocals was part of the demo, and while initially intended to be re-recorded, it was considered so perfect as-is that it was left in the outro. Caravan Palace allegedly spent a long time finding the ideal snare sound, too.

The record closes with a smooth swing sample, as the group made it clear to their fans that, despite all the genre experiments and melodic detours, the departing message was simple: “Yes, Caravan is still very much into swing.”

On 16 October 2015, was unleashed onto the world. It would open at #64 in the UK Albums Chart, #51 in France’s SNEP, and reach #3 on Billboard’s Top Dance Albums chart in the US, where it would remain for 65 weeks. Despite all of these achievements, Caravan Palace admit that the album wasn’t an immediate success — it grew very gradually. Yet even with that, the initial “rejection” was painful.

Specifically, they were surprised to learn that some fans of the first album had almost abandoned Caravan Palace entirely by this point. They honed in on the “gypsy swing” elements of those first records: the crisp guitars, the clarinet work, etc. Vial notes that “When the album came out, the online comments were pretty hard to take. ‘Where’s the gypsy guitar?’ ‘When will you get back to swing?’ — that kind of thing… “In the end, a new audience found us,” he beams. “More international, probably younger too. But it took time. […] Not a passing trend, not driven by media hype — just good, honest word of mouth.”

Per Laurent Masset, owner of the record label Le Plan Recordings, he notes that “After landed, there was a lot of banter backstage where I’d come up to Caravan Palace and ask if they’d seen this or that, from social media or the internet. We discovered a lot of internet activity that we didn’t suspect. I’d never heard of TikTok, and then ‘Wonderland’ happened right as it was being rebranded from musical.ly, which I’d not heard of either. I spent the weekend looking at the hundreds of thousands of user-generated content uploaded live with the song, some with hundreds of thousands of comments, just mind blown.

“There’s also the dances, the finger-tutting, the animation memes, video game culture with the Hotline Miami references, or the Undertale mash-up, but also this overflowing creativity of people all over the world, who constantly reinterpret everything,” he continues. “Be it bootleg T-shirts in Mexico City, people creating their own Caravan Palace-related clothes to wear at concerts, or the thousands and thousands of DeviantArt posts. That’s a recent development in the relationship between an artist and their fans, and it’s a creativity that is sometimes a source of inspiration for the band.”

Adds Vial: “The Cosplay universe brought to us by the young audience, mainly American, is super fun. It’s true that the range of characters featured in our videos gives our young fans something to look forward to. I love seeing this, and I really hope this keeps growing.”

Yet much of the album’s success—and Caravan Palace’s legacy—can be tied to that stunning, upbeat opener, “Lone Digger”. While the song was released as a single in September of 2015, the music video wouldn’t drop until November, handled by the Double Ninja production house. The animated clip shows a gang of anthropomorphic cats making their way into a strip club where a series of mishaps leads to a shockingly violent ending. To call it memorable would be an understatement.

Band manager Olivier Linglet notes that “The band likes to give full artistic freedom to the directors they work with, which means not all videos are to the band’s taste and they rarely match the original meaning of the song. It’s actually happened another time that an MV would have worked better with the lyrics of another song (‘Plume’ vs. ‘Melancolia’).”

Colotis is blunt in her assessment, noting that when she saw the finished video, she “almost cried out of disappointment, because to me it was supposed to be a story for a comic”.

“Originally, I had written something inspired by a strip club in Los Angeles that I went to with a friend, born and raised in LA, whom I was staying with in Highland Park,” Colotis continues. “He introduced me to classic cars and all sorts of cool things in the city. It was during the three months that Toustou and I had decided to spend in LA to improve our English and soak up the American culture. The strip club in question was Jumbo’s Clown Room (I still have the tape!).

“A great place run by women, where a lot of women go because the pole dance acts are very theatrical and athletic. (They say Courtney Love once worked there.) So there have been dozens of interpretations of that song (I don’t think we included them in the album booklet), but originally, it was about a stripper addressing the crowd…”

Thankfully, the gazelle stripper who ends up being the last survivor of the video was a proxy for everything from pushing through the pain to showing the resilience of women in light of more basic and (intrinsically) animal instincts. While her final shot may show her covered in blood, it’s not her own, and this pop-art violent fantasy would soon resonate with the viewers all around the world, transcending even languages.

In an extremely unfortunate bit of timing, a day after the release of the clever-but-violent video, a terrorist attack at Le Bataclan would make world headlines, and Caravan Palace promptly abandoned promotions for the video out of respect for the hundreds of victims. The music video still reached over a million views by the end of that year.

The group continue onward, covering the song “Black Betty” during a taping of the program Taratata, which would soon become a live staple and later a standalone 2017 single that remained closely tied to the era. In the years that followed, even with the release of other Caravan Palace albums, was the gift that kept on giving. They would play on UK television staples hosted by Jonathan Ross and Jools Holland. They’d play St. Petersburg and Moscow. The world opened up to them in a way that it hadn’t for other acts playing within their genre wheelhouse.

“Lone Digger” would eventually crest to over 400 million YouTube views and be certified platinum by the RIAA, becoming a bona fide hit and a generational calling card. They receive accolades for their success, gain a reputation for their riotously fun live shows, and, thanks to “Lone Digger”, inspired an official count of over 10,000 pieces of MV-inspired fan art alone by January 2020.

“I remember one day when my local school called me because my son, who must have been in sixth grade at the time, had gotten into a fight because a kid had told him ‘your dad is a pornographer’ after watching ‘Lone Digger’,” recalls Masset. “It turned into the event of the day at school, with a fight scheduled after class, so there was a crowd, and the police were called. I was a little embarrassed, but secretly quite happy that a Caravan Palace video was reaching out into suburban America.”

The release of 2019’s Chronologic and 2024’s Gangbusters Melody Club was via Caravan Palace’s own sublabel, appropriately named Lone Diggers. “Lone Diggers is our own little lab,” beams Delaporte. “We built it to keep full creative control, from the music itself, the artwork, the visuals, even the timing of releases. […] After years in the industry, we just wanted to run our own ship, release what feels right. It’s freedom, and it sounds like us.”

Thanks to those wise decisions both creatively and economically, the milestones just kept tumbling towards them: Soon, they’d pass over a billion YouTube views, net hundreds of millions of streams, and continue to be one of the most prominent and active acts in the electro-swing movement, up to the point where “electro-swing” increasingly feels like too limiting of a label for what they’ve been able to accomplish.

Looking back on it all, Vial marvels at how “Lone Digger” and would shape their identities. “It became one of the most popular songs in the genre — and the band’s biggest hit — so that’s kind of reassuring,” he notes. “It’s always worth taking risks.”

“Why deprive yourself of the thrill of ‘unlikely destinations’ and not take the side roads of free creation when you have the opportunity?” Colotis chimes in. “It’s currently a luxury, but I dream of a world where taking risks would be the norm. Where even if it is not always easy, possible or comfortable, we would consider it a ‘duty’ in creative professions and as basic hygiene for any self-respecting artist.”

That first risk was the most important: Caravan Palace breaking their cardinal “no previews” rule and playing “Lone Digger” in front of a New York audience nearly a year before its formal release. April Fools’ Day may have only been the day prior to that first live performance of the classic, but the only fools out there are the ones who doubted such a dynamic outfit would ever make it this big.