The Bellwether

Nothing about it made sense. With their screaming virtuosity, utterly eerie mindmeld, and shrugging irreverence toward their own astonishing gifts, DOMi & JD BECK seemed beamed in from another dimension, and our familiar existence contorted itself to their presence. The year that they more or less arrived, they bowled over buttoned-up jazz fans with a cover of a Coltrane classic that they renamed “Giant Nuts,” they wowed blunt-puffing hip-hop heads with a dizzying 4 minutes and 20 seconds of live medley-ed Madvillain songs, and they rearranged the rules of pop by jamming with Ariana Grande and Thundercat on a pandemic-era livestream — Domi on keys, head bobbing to the beat while using all four limbs to make a band’s worth of sound, and JD on drums, looking like he’s having the chillest time of his life at roughly 1,000,000 BPM. And that was before they earned two GRAMMY noms including Best New Artist for a debut album (2022’s NOT TiGHT) that featured Herbie Hancock next to Mac DeMarco next to Busta Rhymes, released by the iconic Blue Note Records in partnership with Anderson .Paak’s friskier APESHIT, Inc. label. As their unclassifiable sound then whisked them to stages the world over, the duo were touted as Gen Z ambassadors between eras, genres, and energies… And then — poof! — they vanished, social accounts frozen in time, like the interplanetary visitors many suspected them to be all along.

So, you might reasonably ask, what happened to DOMi & JD BECK?  

WHO ASKED?

No, we’re not yelling at you. That’s the answer. WHO ASKED? is the long-awaited sophomore album from the French-born Domi Louna and Texas native JD Beck, and it’s just as surprising as you would expect, but also unlike anything they have done before — somehow both simpler and more complex. On the one hand, there are no special guests unless you count: Zach Hill (Death Grips, Hella) pitching in on sound design, Domi’s brother Noé Degalle adding his own compositional chops to three songs, and .Paak co-writing lyrics to one (“HAD ENOUGH”). On the other hand, there are more contributors than ever: a small sinfonietta of seasoned classical players press-ganged into bringing the duo’s incredibly singular, super maximalist, and strikingly beautiful orchestral vision to life. Oh, and DOMi & JD BECK sing on pretty much every track. It might almost resemble chamber pop, if chamber pop had 50 times as many notes, shifty time signatures, and an overall vibe of jazz-born indietronica cut with verdant flower-child freedom.

“This time around we felt like we had a pretty sharp idea of what we wanted the album to be before even starting,” say DOMi & JD BECK who prefer to be quoted as a single entity. They typically finish each other’s sentences anyway. “We wanted it orchestral, fully written out before even playing one note, with stronger songwriting intentions but just as crazy playing-wise and harmony-wise. We just wanted every note to mean something, and nothing left to chance.”

To accomplish that, “We made this record by ourselves and for ourselves, very selfishly,” mostly at their home studio in Dallas. For over two years, they kept to an until-now secret regimen:

• 8 hours sleep
• 8 hours music (practicing and/or composing)
• 8 hours video games, walking and hanging with our dogs, watching YouTube, drinking

THC-infused seltzers to get high, etc.

• 3 or 4 days off per month (maybe)

They began work immediately coming off of their early 2024 Australian tour, fighting through jet lag because the plan had already been burning a hole in their shared brain for a few months. It began when DOMi & JD BECK were asked to play a series of dates backed by Holland’s mighty Metropole Orkest. They had to orchestrate NOT TiGHT, fast, using the music notation software Sibelius. “We’d never had the challenge/opportunity to write for that many different instruments and sonic textures before, and that really opened our minds to a totally different way of writing,” say DOMi & JD BECK. They’ve long preferred writing from their heads, on anything other than their core instruments, to avoid the influence of muscle memory. But this approach bypassed physical limitations (arms, legs, instrument types) altogether. For WHO ASKED?, “Every single note was written that way, and it was extremely fun to learn how to play our own songs after!”

That applied doubly to the hired muscle. Prioritizing musicians with the “best, most beautiful classical tone ever” who were absolutely “ready to go in” because the parts were so difficult, the pair assembled a crew whose chairs and credits span international ensembles and divergent studio sessions. Most were strangers to each other and still are: Due to the complexity of their parts, each was recorded separately, playing to nothing more than Sibelius demos and a click.

Of course, you wouldn’t know that listening to seamless WHO ASKED? instrumentals like the opener “ÉPiPHANiE,” a symphonic dream that moves through springy passages, speakeasy grooves, cinematic swerves, and RPG console melodies in just 2:33. Or the delightfully chaotic “CONCERTiNO (FOR PiANO, DRUMS & ORCHESTRA),” where Domi rips on a real ass piano over JD’s crunchy two-stick stutter and a 12-piece lineup of woodwinds, strings, and brass.

Their vocals were the last major addition, 18 months in. The decision to sing came naturally when they realized that — despite what it may sound like — they were writing typical pop song structures. “The human voice is the oldest instrument and the most direct way to connect,” say DOMi & JD BECK, so they approached it indirectly, of course, penning lyrics inspired by scenes from a film script that they wrote and then never shot. The resulting poetry possesses a strange magic, often forming a fractal that from different angles resembles words about love specifically, or life broadly, or the creative process writ large, or even the literal sounds of the current song.

Take the brightly glitchy, celesta-blessed “EXiT,” for example: “Obstacles we welcome in, unknown feelings comforted/Still elated, leaping through no other predicaments.” Or “RAiN,” which captures something elemental about fear and comfort while sounding like its namesake. Similarly, “PUZZLE PiECES” is full of interlocking sonic radness, and is also maybe an ode to a partnership bigger than its bits: “One by one, parts come undone/One by one, parts turn to one.”

The autobiographical appears to creep in elsewhere, too. There’s a seemingly literal song about “GROWiNG OLDER” that feels earned and overdue given that Domi and JD both devoted their entire childhoods to their crafts. The sweetly unfolding “PHANTOM THREAD” can be read as a tribute to someone who inspired them along the way — a mentor, instructor, parent, or past master. “LOVELY MASQUERADE” with its deeply nasty groove could, in contrast, be about the trademark silliness they’ve brought to every stuffy industry space they’ve entered. And there’s one that’s definitely about their dogs called “SMALL EYES,” which is a perfect four-way split of blue-mood jazz, New Music layering, Dilla deconstructivism, and Hallmarkian earnestness.

But for DOMi & JD BECK, neither the past nor the personal has never been much of a to-do. They gamely shared their kismetic origin story on the last press cycle, but their focus is and always has been their music — which pushes ever forward, even when they aren’t broadcasting each giant step online. In as much as there is one, WHO ASKED?’s denouement is a two-part affair. First comes “CLiMBiNG HiGH,” a J-pop-bounding stunner where their voices intertwine, doing exactly what the title describes as they coo words that double as a decent raison d’être: “Climbing high, just to see the view, but the sky is still above you.” Then comes the orchestral “ÉPiLOGUE” which works hard to provide a sense of closure — all soft tones, Disney twinkle, and satisfying progressions — only to end on the string-swell equivalent of an interrobang:

?!

There’s more to come. There always is. DOMi & JD BECK will see you in the future.