It feels impossible to sit still while listening to Jungle. If you’re not bouncing already, your body will surely spring to life when the chorus hits.

“Ultimately, it’s music that inherently feels good,” Tom McFarland tells the Weekly during a recent Zoom video call. “Sometimes you need that. People just need to feel good.”

The London electronic duo—McFarland and Josh Lloyd-Watson—have been making music together since they were childhood friends. In 2013, they formed Jungle, a disco-funk collective that works with artists of all types. And the pair’s artistic ambitions go beyond music, with Lloyd-Watson co-directing Jungle’s riveting, elaborately choreographed single-shot music videos.

We caught up with McFarland ahead of Life Is Beautiful to discuss why Jungle performs with a full band, his Gorillaz admiration and more.

You’ve cited Gorillaz as an past inspiration for Jungle. How so? The way that they have created the whole concept behind Gorillaz is inspiring as a whole piece of art. They took that concept and followed through with it. It’s quite rare for artists these days to have such singular visions and to pull them off for such an extended period of time. The whole idea of these characters, this other world ... it’s a lens into a different universe. And the space that that music inhabits within that world is really inspiring and something we’ve always tried to create with Jungle.

We’ve always tried to create something that is other. It’s not us. Like, I can look in on it. I can put myself out of it, but I can also open the door and step in. That’s because it’s not about who we are as people. It’s about the music. It’s about the videos. It’’s about the live show. The individual aspects of Tom or Josh don’t work within the framework of what we’re trying to create.

Dancers are a key part of the Jungle-verse, featuring prominently in your music videos. What do they bring to the equation for you? We enjoy working with people who are at the absolute top of their game, because what they create and what they interpret through your music is something often incredibly magical and quite moving. It’s amazing seeing the dancers’ faces when they’re performing for the videos—it’s like an energy that you sort of see in yourself. ... It’s that energy when I’m making new music.

When did you last dance to your own music? Every night onstage I try to have a little boogie. My mum’s a dance teacher, so I actually have a bit of a background in dance. Not to a [high] level—my knees are f*cked, so I can’t really be doing splits and backflips into the splits—but I like to feel the music onstage. I can’t stand still.

You and Josh perform with a seven-piece band, which surely adds costs and complicates logistics. Why do it? Because it’s what we would want to see. Even with all of this electronic music we grew up loving, there was nothing more thrilling than when you actually saw it and it wasn’t just two guys with their decks. When we saw Caribou for the first time and it was a band, it was like “Oh sh*t man, they’re actually f*cking doing this.”

It turns something inherently electronic into something else. You add humanity, you add a human element into that, and it’s chaos really, because everything that’s computerized is orderly. Everything that’s human is chaotic. Having individuals mix individual thought and individual process with what we’ve created using machines is a fascinating combination to us and just pumps harder onstage. And we enjoy having people around us doing it. I don’t think we’d enjoy it as much if it was just us two, because there’s not as much energy. There’s not as much life. There’s not as much vibrancy. It pops harder.

Jungle released its latest album, Loving in Stereo, in August of last year. What’s next? It just depends on what sounds we’re digging, or if we want to be more experimental, if we want to make more pop songs, or who knows. I think we really want to collaborate with more people on [the next] record.

You guys played Life Is Beautiful 2018. Have you spent much more time in Las Vegas? We also played at the Hard Rock, supporting Alt-J in between our first two ever Coachella weekends back in 2015 … and we DJed there at one of the Grammy after-parties in April. I play golf there as well, so I feel like I know it quite well.

Who jumps out at you on this year’s Life Is Beautiful lineup? Let me have a quick look … Arctic Monkeys, yes, I’d like to see them. Calvin Harris, no. Gorillaz, yes. Lorde, yes. Jack Harlow, not my vibe. Beach House, yes. Jungle, I’d like to see Jungle. Oliver Tree, don’t really know who he is. ... SG Lewis, he’s a nice guy, he plays golf. Wet Leg, very good, nominated for the Mercury this year. Neil Frances toured with us on one of our first-ever tours. Oh, Palace! Niche, they’re from London. Oh, and Georgia, she’s great, she’s a good friend of ours. She used to work at Rough Trade in West London, so I used to buy my records off of her.

JUNGLE Friday, September 16, 7:35 p.m., Downtown Stage.

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