Dragonette doesn’t plan on burning out anytime soon

Photo by Nyssa Kuwahara

Leaning back with a drink in hand before their show at the Wave on Thursday night, vocalist Martina Sorbara and bassist and producer Dan Kurtz of Dragonette couldn’t be more at ease—and who could blame them?

After working with Martin Solveig on the summer anthem, “Hello,” the three-piece electronic-pop band from Toronto became an international name, giving them even more incentive to push out their third album, set for release in the next few months. The happily married bandmates took some time to chat before getting on stage.

You recently released two new songs—the first on your own since 2010. How has the response been?
Dan Kurtz: It’s been really good. I haven’t even read one mediocre comment about them. I guess that’s maybe because the haters are too bored—we weeded them all out over the first two records.

How do these tracks differ from music you’ve released in the past?
DK: It’s a lot better, a lot newer. I was just thinking about how much time we spend writing them and recording them, but they actually don’t have much to do with us until the three of us have played them together. The songs are much more in our minds at the moment.

How was the writing and recording process for the new album?
DK: Very long, very sporadic and very agonizing. There were very few periods that were longer than 10 days where we all had time to be in a place, get over jet lag and get back into the into the writing process.

You’ve had the opportunity to release quite a few tracks with Martin Solveig. How did this partnership come about?
Martina Sorbara: We met on a bus in Australia because we were playing the same festival and the bus was taking us back to the airport. We just started talking and then he was in touch later on. I don’t even remember giving him our email. When he wrote us, he was working on a song for Jean Paul Gautier and invited me to sing on it. When it came time for him to actually write his album, he wanted to include us again.

Your first album, Galore, had a very promiscuous, female empowering sound. How has your music evolved since then?
DK: She’s a little more under our thumb now!
MS: Yeah, right! I think it’s still very she-powered. I think that I’m interested in expressing a different version of femininity than what we usually see or hear. I don’t relate to what comes out of pop music in terms of the mood and the personality of it, so I like to express a different kind of femininity lyrically.

How have you guys stayed grounded after so much success in such little time?
DK: We drove a minivan over here, so that’s pretty grounded, isn’t it? We’ve almost totally collapsed our music and personal lives together, so they’re pretty much the same thing now.

What can we expect from you in 2012? Do you have any big plans after the album release?
DK: The tour thing. There’s going to be a lot of that I think, and maybe we’ll try to write a couple more songs in the meantime. For us, it’s so exciting to just do the tour thing, as opposed to doing the touring thing while trying to write a record. It’s exciting—it’s a bit tiring already, but I can tell it’s going to be a great year.