Named ‘Iceland’s most exciting young band’ by Pitchfork after the release of their celebrated sophomore LP Sports last year, enigmatic trio Fufanu have announced the release of a series of EPs throughout 2018 – each one an exercise in exploring their multiple sonic personalities, from motorik and post-punk to alt-techno, to woozy avant-garde electronica. The second instalment in The Dialogue Series – Dialogue II will be released on One Little Indian Records on 24th August.

Lead single taken from the EP, Typical Critical, explores the concept of online love vs real life love. “How we not only want to be loved and adored, but we want to feel it as well” says lyricist Kaktus Einarsson. “You want something more than to see it only through social media likes and emoji’s that someone loves you – you want to actually feel it. Feel a more complex love from what the world feeds on. Handmade love vs. mass-produced love.”

Once the band returned to Iceland after a long stint touring, they had a bag of demoes written at different junctures on the road, purposefully created with no regard for a unified sound. They were eager to release the tracks into the world as and when they were written, looking to capture the sense of urgency with which the songs were formed. However, they asked MC, DJ and producer Alap Momin to listen to the demoes and before they knew it, he was on a flight from Harlem to Iceland to work with the band. The result of his input only served to highlight their desire for a distinctive exploration of genres between each record. Kaktus laughs: “Three Icelandic techno-rockers brought the Harlem club scene to their studio in Iceland – it was a life changing week.

“It is a dialogue between musicians with different backgrounds, different approaches and different live styles, but we all have the same excitement about going into a new field of sounds. For example, we did cosmiche / motorik but worked it like hip hop and did pop like it was techno and also the other way around. Musically, the outcome goes from being deep and drugged, to fast and harsh, with heartfelt ballads in the middle.

The trio don’t care for being placed neatly into a box, which has never been more evident in their career to date as it is throughout each of these three EPs. Lead singer Kaktus Einarsson comments: “What is great about the creative workflow of Fufanu is that we’ve never just stopped. We’ve never hit a sound that we’re going to stick with, it has always been about discovering what it is we want to make during each moment, and to just keep on exploring.

“There’s this crazy need for people to always categorize everything. Life isn’t just on or off, good or bad – it’s everything in the middle"