If you’re at all tapped into the electronic music scene, you’ve probably heard of [Adventure Club](https://www.instagram.com/adventureclub/?hl=en). Composed of Leighton James and Christian Srigley, the electronic duo has established themselves as mainstays in the music industry, first breaking out as a hardcore pop-punk band before taking over the dubstep and dance music scene with their standout melodic bass sound. To date, their breakout remixes of Yuna’s "Lullabies" and Flight Facilities’ “Crave You" continue to serve as the go-to, turn up records to drop in any club, function, festival, rave, concert… you name it.
Fast forward to 2021, Adventure Club continues to push boundaries and defy limits, as evidenced in their upcoming album titled _Love // Chaos_. Serving as the follow-up to their debut effort _Red // Blue_ released back in 2016, the new project sees both members having gone through much personal and professional growth, with real life events and experiences inspiring each one of the 25 tracks.
The 5-year wait for _Love // Chaos_ speaks for itself, and fans can’t wait for its arrival. As always, the harmonizing vocals, unparalleled melodies, and hard-hitting basslines set Adventure Club apart from the rest, proving exactly why they deserve all their flowers. Additionally, Leighton reveals they’re returning to their own Adventure Club roots for this project.
Flaunt caught up with Leighton James via Zoom, who was posted in Montreal after just completing an exam for his Spanish class. Read below as we discuss their return to festivals, favorite song to play, why it took 5 years for their new album_,_ the meaning behind _Love // Chaos_, getting caught up in the lifestyle, the creation of “Here,” goals, and more!
**How was your exam?**
It was good. I started studying Spanish two months ago. Every two months I have to do an exam in order to pass to the next level. Long story short, I’m eligible to get my Panamanian Citizenship, I have to pass a Spanish equivalent test when I go over there.
**I used to watch you guys at raves. Fondest memories from those days?**
I’m continuously still making them, not so much last year but we’re a lot slammed now. This past week, it was a whole new slew of memories we made. We played at one of my favorite festivals called Lost Lands Festival, it’s a purely dubstep festival. It was one of those sets where everyone plays all their heavy shit and we played all of our old shit, from 2012. We played all that shit, it was fun.
**How did it feel to be back touring?**
It feels great. During the pandemic we were doing drive-in shows. It’s not the same but at least you get a taste for it. It’s nice to be back every weekend playing in front of crowds of people again. The first show we came back to was the Lovey Dovey festival in Texas, there was still a big stigma about playing shows. After that festival, the floodgates opened and everyone started touring again.
**What’s your favorite song to play? What’s the fan’s favorite song for you to play?**
They’re one of the same because when we play it, we know it’s our fan’s favorite song and we feed off that energy. It’s probably one of our oldest songs. Our “Crave You” remix always goes off, everyone sings along and it gets us amped. It’s our favorite song to play still to this day, or our more recent song “Crash 2.0.”
**When’s the new album, _Love // Chaos_, dropping?**
It’s dropping soon. Our label hasn’t given us a date, but they say soon. I’m really excited for it, it’s definitely been a long time coming.
**5 years right?**
Yeah, that seems to be our interval between albums. It’s super slow.
**Why is that?**
I guess in between touring and taking our time creatively. Especially with this album, it has 25 tracks. Almost every single track is a collaboration with another artist that we’ve looked up to, other artists who we’ve toured with in the past, and up and coming artists. Between getting all those avenues together, getting all the paperwork done, not wanting to release an album mid-pandemic when we knew we couldn’t tour it — it was supposed to be released beginning of last year, but it made no sense for it. As it got pushed, we ended up adding 6 songs to it. Now’s a great time to release it, and tour next year.
**How meaningful is the album title, _Love // Chaos_?**
It’s one of our biggest endeavors so far. We’re super proud of the album and the collabs we have on it. We have some of our favorite bands, we have Tilian from Dance Gavin Dance? there. We’ve got Justin Jesso, who came up with Kygo. Krewella, Yuna, we’ve touched on so many different aspects of our sound design and production capabilities. Some of the songs, you can definitely hear 2012 Adventure Club in there. We purposely tried to recreate sounds that were popular in 2012 and 2013. We went back to those old school dubstep days. We’ve tried to touch on some newer motifs in music today.
As far as thematically goes, we always have a juxtaposition between heaviness and more melodic stuff. On _Red // Blue_, Red was about the more aggressive songs and Blue was about the more melodic songs. The idea lends itself to this album. A lot of the themes in the songs deal with our early days as artists, the things we loved and how that led to some chaos in our career where maybe we don’t like to be involved with certain aspects of the lifestyle. I won’t go into too much detail.
**Is it partying?**
Yeah, you get caught up in it. You get accustomed to a certain lifestyle and because so many of our peers are also on that wavelength, you don’t realize how much you may be straying from a certain path. At one point, we were not ourselves and we needed to take a step back. Christian and stopped drinking, stopped doing any extracurricular activities for 5 years. So about a year before we released _Red // Blue,_ we stopped everything, took a step back and took accountability for our lives and everything. That whole definite joy...
**What worked for you in terms of getting sober?**
I wish I had greater words of wisdom to impart. I read a quick book on addiction, on how your circuitsy has to get rewired. Christian and I had — I wouldn’t call it an intervention but we definitely had a sit down. We said “if we want our careers to continue, there are certain steps that we have to navigate and get ourselves through. As soon as we came to that realization, the next day we forced ourselves to quit everything cold turkey and hold each other accountable as a buddy system. It was definitely tough for the first 3 months. We had other vices. Instead of drinking, we’d have some pre-workout. We’d go workout and write music, we had to keep our minds occupied that way. Obviously you always go through withdrawals of stuff but when you’re teaming up and everyone’s on the same page, it makes it a lot easier.
**Bring us back to the studio session for “Here.”**
That was super great, we got to work with Karra. We’ve been waiting to work with her for years now, she’s a super talented vocalist. That song was written two to three years ago. Some songs you write them years in advance and they only get to see the light of day a couple years later. That one was one of our first times bringing in actual guitars, really trying to get that real sense in there. I wanted to bridge the gap between older Adventure Club and newer Adventure Club for that single. It seems to be a fan favorite already
**Talk about how the dance music scene has evolved, and being the forefathers of this melodic bass sound.**
When we first started, Christian and I looked up to Rusko, Skrillex, all these guys. We come from a hardcore/metal core background. We were in touring bands for a long time. When we discovered the dubstep world, we discovered the really heavy stuff and that’s the path we wanted to take. We wanted to make the grimiest shit. If you go on our SoundCloud and dig a bit, you’ll find our first songs, like “Spiritus Sancti” or “Kaboom” are in that heavier vein.
We really found our sound with the “Crave You” remix. We realized that using beautiful female vocals or haunting vocals and easier listening synths resonated with us. It started to resonate with our fans and soon-to-be fans, so we definitely went down that lane. At the time, there weren't too many artists. There was Nero, Flux, Skrillex, Rusko, there were a handful of artists touring at the time. If you compare the scene and the fans back then to the scene today, it’s mind-blowing how much everything has grown. You have hundreds of artists releasing music everyday. Every single genre is blended together. You could have hardcore screamo mixed with some trap, mixed with some future house. Every single artist is doing what they can to push boundaries. I love finding new artists everyday and seeing what electronic music has to offer.
**Best encounter you guys had with a fan?**
Almost every single encounter is unique, we love meeting all of our fans. Some come up to us with our lyrics tattooed on their body. Some ask us to sign our names and they’ll get that signature tattooed. Some of the most memorable moments are when people come up to you and they say “this song has changed my life for this reason.” You get to connect with them one on one with that person. You realize 24 hours or a month in the studio making a song can impact one person in such a powerful way. It makes studio grinds and touring grinds all that much more beautiful and worth it.
**Any goals for yourselves at this point in your career?**
When we started, we had absolutely 0 goals. We wanted to make some noise and put it out into the world. We wanted to do it in the way that we wanted to do it. That’s what took off. From there, we hit milestones as we went along. We got the Juno nomination, Grammy nomination. We got to tour the world, we played Coachella. We want to continue touring and releasing music, gaining fans. Hopefully, we win that Grammy. Maybe have our own label festival someday. There’s so much more we want to accomplish, but at the same time, we’re extremely surprised with everything we’ve been able to do in the past decade.
**Coming up as a kid in Canada, did you think you’d be here today?**
Not even close. We played our first show in some small club with 500 people, that was the end-all-be-all. That was the pinnacle of it, we were so fucking hyped about it. Kept getting better and better. We’ve never taken any next step for granted. I can tell you the one thing we did get tired of was the traveling, being squished in between a baby or some dude with giant shoulders. But after being home for a year because of this pandemic, I’ll never take a flight or traveling schedule for granted again.
**Anything else you want to let the people know?**
Album coming soon, 25 songs. Get ready to sit down for 3 hours and listen to it. There will be a tour, we’ll be touring the album with a whole new production. Christian and I will be playing some new instruments. Super excited for everyone to hear it, I hope they love it.
**What instruments do you play?**
Both of us play the guitar, piano, drums. We play almost every instrument, but we’ve never flexed it live. If you do look online, you can definitely find fragments or pieces of our old band. If you look hard enough. \[laughs\]
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