Finishing an album is challenging for any artist. For The Frixion, it borders on miraculous. Firstly, they live almost 700 miles apart, with vocalist Gene Serene in Berlin and producer and keys man Lloyd Price in the UK’s Southend-on-Sea. Secondly, the album was written, produced and mastered during the worst global health crisis of the last 100 years. Thirdly, and most pertinently of all, both artists are still getting over the effects of cancer. Lloyd lost his wife to it and Gene had it herself.
After her diagnosis, Gene all but forgot about music. She focused on getting well, dealing with the effects of chemotherapy and spending time with her daughter. After losing her hair, she found her last gig a struggle so “kind of went off-planet” for six months. “But once it was all over, I wanted to get back on it like never before,” she says.
Energy and Focus
Now Gene is giving music more energy and focus than ever – and it’s paying off. Four years after their first track as The Frixion – 2017’s From Dusk Till Dawn – their debut album To Hell and Back surfaces today on the AnalogueTrash label. The longplayer is a cohesive collection of driving synth songs punchy and groovy enough for the dancefloor but nuanced enough for other contexts. Straddling that divide between functionality and proper songwriting is rare in dance music. Doing it with proper chords, top lines and real lyrical wit rather than formless ad-libs is even rarer.
“All bands evolve, don’t they?” says Gene. “But there is certainly new depth to the music we make now. I think we’ll always have that big chorus moment but generally, there’s more subtlety to it.”
Playful
Looking every bit the front-woman, Gene is the more playful of the two. She interjects our Zoom chat with funny quips and makes jokes. Lloyd is a little more serious – shy, maybe – wearing a leather biker jacket buttoned to the top. He agrees they’ve really found their sound.
“It used to be like, fill it out, make it as big as it can be,” explains Lloyd. “But when you’re working with a great singer who delivers great lyrics and needs that space, you don’t need to fill up the mixes anymore. So with this album, we went back and reviewed some tracks. We looked at all the elements and thought, ‘What do we love about this one, what don’t we like?’ Playing songs live and getting feedback from the audience helped with that process. So we reduced them a lot and got them all to work together as one piece of work.”
Cathartic
The album features two distinctly darker tracks – To Hell and Back and Cry, Cry, Cry. Both were “sort of cathartic” for Gene and Lloyd: ways of ridding themselves of the anguish and bad energy that come from dealing with cancer. “But then it was just like, ‘Come on, there’s enough crap going on in the world right now. Let’s do something uplifting’,” says Gene. Everybody needed it, man.”
Centrepiece
They came up with We Should Be Dancing, a track inspired by the music of Prince. Released last December, it’s the album’s funky centrepiece or as Lloyd puts it, “a bit of a breather”. Gene cuts in, “You’ve got a responsibility, haven’t you? How do you want to make people feel? For that reason, this track became very important to me. We knew it was a bad time to release the track,” reflects Gene, “but we felt everyone needed the positivity the track holds.”
Scheduled for re-release on 23 July, We Should Be Dancing boasts quite the remix package. Among the five mixes, Papermachetiger turn in club and dub mixes and Tim Dorney – “who really helped us hone the album,” says Gene – delivers his Tin Gun Extended Mix. Check out all the versions here.
Coincidences
The Frixion got together through a series of coincidences, Gene’s best mate featured on the cover of one of Lloyd’s albums, and one of Lloyd’s mates used Gene’s vocals on a track he really liked. Once they got talking, Lloyd sent over From Dusk Till Dawn and was impressed with what Gene did with it.
“It was very apparent we had something quite unique and interesting to listen to,” says Lloyd. “It was quite different from what I’d done in the past, it had more sensitivity. The lyrics and vocals are key elements. If you’ve got someone who can write great lyrics and sing them, and it’s arranged beautifully, then that’s going to make the music stand out.”
Gene says she finds certain things happen that make vocals relevant. So To Hell and Back was about being ill “but it also relates to everyone after what has happened with the pandemic. But generally, the music speaks to me. The words come more from the rhythm of the melody. Sometimes I work on a theme but I just do what I want, innit.”
Success
Before The Frixion, Gene and Lloyd had worked on numerous successful projects. A member of dark electro act Massive Ego, Lloyd also worked solo as Polemic and has remixed a wide range of acts. Gene’s vocals sit on plenty of early progressive house records. After performing across Europe with the likes of S’Express, she was championed by the electroclash scene and later put out solo album The Polaris Experiment, which she co-produced with Bob Earland.
With The Frixion’s debut album out now, Gene is excited about touring it as soon as possible. When asked if the solo projects will continue, she says not for now. “I like this band,” she laughs. “So do I,” adds Lloyd. Add the iamCrü team to the fan list too.
To Hell and Back is available on all major digital platforms. There’s a double CD version with remixes from Mark Trueman (Sinestar), DPPLGNGRS, Warboy and The Frixion label mates Vieon. The album comes as a limited edition red vinyl too.
Photos: Manko Sebastian
Also read: Monolink Underscores his Brilliance on New Album ‘Under Darkening Skies’
