Pop duo Daphne and Celeste are back with a new album.

We spoke to the singers, Daphne & Celeste and producer/songwriter Max Tundra about the upcoming project.

When Daphne & Celeste topped the charts at the turn of the millenium with ‘Ooh Stick You’ and ‘U.G.L.Y’ it was a very different time. Hillary Clinton was elected for her inaugural term as a senator. Big Brother was broadcast for the first time. Britney Spears had just released Oops!… I Did It Again. Daphne & Celeste infamously followed their two hit singles with a performance at Reading festival, which was overtly rock-focused at the time. Needless to say the audience response was less than rapturous, but the group did earn the respect of many fellow performers for their “punk” attitude and refusal to leave the stage.

Still, the Reading performance was the beginning of the end for the duo. They disbanded to pursue other projects, with Daphne finding success as a screenwriter and Celeste working on acting and other music. Fast forward a few years, and Daphne & Celeste were back together again after one simple tweet from indie pop auteur Max Tundra.

@Daphne1280 @celestecruz I make weird pop music. It’d be fun to write and produce a comeback single for you two.

— Max Tundra (@MaxTundra) February 13, 2011

The duo’s response? “That’d be rad.” And it was. The initial result of the collaboration was the single ‘You and I Alone’, released in 2015 to critical acclaim. True to Tundra’s word, the song is “weird pop music”, but in the very best way. It was such a successful collaboration that the three musicians teamed up to put together an entire album, which will be available this March.

The first thing we ask Daphne & Celeste is whether they would have reunited anyway if it wasn’t for Max Tundra’s tweet? The answer is a resounding no. “Only Tundra’s tweet could get us out of retirement,” they say. Since the original tweet dates back to 2011, the trio have been working together for a very long time now.

“It started as just one song [‘You and I Alone’] that we recorded in 2011 and released in 2015,” the duo tells us. “We met Max in person for the first time when we were promoting the single in Los Angeles, hit it off, and decided to keep collaborating. When we first started the album, the world was in such a different place. Our lives were in different places. Those political, cultural and personal shifts definitely impacted the album.”

With this in mind, what should listeners expect from the album? “Think old-school Tundra mashed up with old-school D&C, then imagine it’s the Summer of Love and you just dropped acid and within seconds teleported to the timeless sounds of 1983, 2018 and 2035.”

When asked where Daphne & Celeste fit into today’s music scene, the girls have a straightforward answer: “We don’t. That’s kind of the point.” Indeed, the duo’s new sound is uniquely distinctive. Despite this, many of pop’s leading artists (think Taylor Swift) have embraced the bubblegum melodies and maximalist production of ‘U.G.L.Y’ et al recently, so there’s a chance the world wasn’t ready for Daphne & Celeste in 2000. “Will people ever be ready?” is the duo’s response. “Seriously. They still might not be.”

With Daphne & Celeste themselves confident in their comeback, we asked Max Tundra, the producer and songwriter behind this project, whether he felt pressure to create songs that could be just as iconic as ‘Ooh Stick You’. His sobering response: “I felt so much pressure that I exploded into a million pieces. Then, once the particles reformed into my new body, I found my legs had turned into synthesizers, my arms were drums and my face was a big old treble clef. Once this transformation had taken place, I danced a merry jig around the world and the music promptly emerged.”

This being the case, Daphne & Celeste Save the World is sure to be full of surprises.

Book Daphne & Celeste now to bring the duo to your venue.