Robert DeLong shuffles us through his Playlist of Doom ahead of Madrid gig

Robert DeLong. // Photo by Corinne Schiavone

One of September’s best gifts to the dance-punk infused among us was the release of the latest album from electro-pop raconteur Robert DeLong. Playlist of Doom.

His first full length since 2021, sees the wildly eccentric multi-instrumentalist feeling out the edges of what genre divisions he can stretch, while tap-dancing across new tones and a decidedly heavier subject matter—the painful honesty of reckoning with one’s past and broken bits of personality, all set to huge bashing walls of party anthem deliverance.

The new album’s single “soft boy“—a track with an upbeat pop-sounding veneer disguising a reflective look at society’s distaste for men expressing emotion—arrives alongside the Latin-tinged “Deserve It All (feat. Pahua.)” After a decade of unwaveringly amphetamine’d hits, DeLong is perhaps best known for his stunning live shows. Kansas Citians in the know have probably caught him swinging through a number of times pre-pandemic, catching him both in tours where he brought full backing bands and gigs where he alone loops and leads the tracks from atop a digital tower of Babel. No matter the alignment of instrumentation, DeLong is not to be missed.

Ahead of DeLong’s Oct. 7 co-headlining show (alongside Atlas Genius) at Madrid, we spoke to the creator about honesty, Jealousy, and doing an album of diss tracks… about yourself.

The Pitch: I hope I’m the first one to ask this on your media cycle, but what is on your playlist of doom? 

Robert DeLong: I mention a good chunk of it in the song itself. I have Laurence Pike on there, which is ambient experimental jazz. I’ve been listening to a lot of rhythm and sound from the late 90s, along with Joe Pass, who is virtuosic with the jazz guitar. More Pugilist (Alex Dickson) who has some great downtempo stuff. In general: nothing palatable for others.

Chaos menu. 

I make pop music so that I could find a place between the overly complicated, abrasive stuff and music you can just turn your brain off to and bliss out.

In that vein, I’ve spent years wanting to ask you… In your song “Jealousy,” did you set out to use a series of chords that had never been used in a pop song before, or did that just come together naturally? It’s one of my all-time favorite tracks, I think in part because on first listen, I was asking, “What the fuck is he doing there?”

I’ve never gotten to talk about this one, actually. They’re weird chords! I was just playing stuff on the keyboard, messing around, and I hit what was absolutely the wrong chord. But then I thought that if you hit it quick enough on a strange beat, maybe it would work. I wrote that one with a buddy, and we were trying to figure out the melody, and there are only a few notes that work in both keys, so that simplified the next part considerably.

Is this tour you with a full band or solo or some other arrangement? 

It’s me plus a drummer this time.

I’ve seen you scale up to having a number of musicians with you, and I used to really enjoy your one-man performances. What are the pros/cons of these arrangements? Especially going with just yourself and a drummer, which is new.

It’s good to have someone else on stage. There’s an amount of personality and energy, and frankly it’s just good to not be completely alone up there. It helps that my drummer has been a great friend and collaborator for a long time and we’re thick as thieves. Sometimes we’ll make eye contact in the middle of a song and there’s just some unspoken joke or shared moment—a detail to catch each other off-guard. The interplay is great to have, and it keeps me from getting too far into my own head—having a friend up there with you, bringing this to life. There’s a joy in having live versions of certain instruments up there with you, but equally not every song calls for every instrument. I have plenty of songs where what I’m doing, mixed with live looping, is more than enough—fully in my control, and maybe there isn’t even a need for a guitar, so why have a guitarist up there?

You’re back on the road after a year off. Is there material here you’re excited to road test—tracks you can’t wait to play for people?

We only recently sat down to figure out how to arrange the live versions of some of the new tracks. As you can imagine, based on my show, that’s a long process. We just got the software up and running, and the arrangements have already started being reinvented for several of the Playlist of Doom cuts. It’s funny how some of the songs that seem like album-only tracks can wind up being a standout live, you know? As opposed to the singles. And I’ve got a lot of songs on the album that are on the shorter side, I’m not doing twelve-minute jams with these, so it’s an opportunity to do a bunch of material in a normal length show. Even tracks like “Soft Boy” when I add in some more room to breathe—that’s still only a four minute slice of the set.

Your album Walk Like Me came out in late 2021 and that seemed to deal with the combination of pandemic depression and a break-up—along with the society information overload thing. What was your journey between that album rolling out and the new LP? What is Playlist of Doom bringing to the table that pushes your narrative into the next phase?

Walk Like Me was certainly about mourning the loss of something and/or feeling anxiety about everything, all of the time. This is a much more internal, personal record. These are stories about my life—very true experiences about myself or things that happened in my orbit. It came together from this origin point of just being painfully honest with myself, about me, and trying to write that all down as straightforwardly as possible. Songs that are honest are surprisingly easy to write. There are a few tracks that are holdovers from previous eras—things that only really made sense now. But the majority of the album came from this wave of focused honesty. It poured out of me in a quick two month period, and each time I went into the studio I was inspired to write something new—it just kept snowballing.

We’re in this cultural moment right now where “diss tracks” are really driving attention. I’m not sure if anyone has pointed this out to you, but a lot of Playlist of Doom seems like a diss track about Robert DeLong. Does that read as true to you?

Right. Okay. Yes, it is very self-critical. I am thinking through the tracks here… yeah, okay. My favorite comedian growing up was Conan O’Brien. Self-deprecating humor always appealed to me more than doing anything at the expense of another person. It’s like you’re beating the world to the punch. These songs feel like putting all my personal anxieties out into the world, for everyone, so that I don’t have to live with it only internally, day after day. Based on the music’s message, I think more people would expect me to be dour. Based on the music I make, I think I’m counteracting that pretty strongly.

Robert DeLong co-headlines with Atlas Genius at Madrid Theater on Oct. 7, 2024. Tickets are available here.