Djustin - Djustin
Just two weeks after the release of THE LEGENDS' "Nightshift" album, Sweden’s Johan Angergård returns alongside long-time American confidant, Rose Suau, to release DJUSTIN’s debut album, "VOYAGERS" on May 5. Since releasing their critically praised EP "TRYST" in May 2016, the duo has been, somewhat telepathically, finishing each others' musical sentences on their respective sides of the Atlantic.
"VOYAGERS" is a glittering, sensual exploration into an unchartered and fully-electrified universe. It is a foretelling of"Future Love", where a newly-conscious, idealized romanticism is propelled by contagious dance beats, synth-driven melodies, and sweetly seductive vocals. The soundscape is sophisticated, vast, and visionary, yet the stories threaded throughout are intimate and relatable. The duo takes us on a journey through a spectrum of emotional highs and lows: from the shining apex of starry-eyed infatuation andinsatiable desire, to the darkest abyss of heartbreak, disconnection and insatiable existentialism. Every detail from beat, hook, and lyrical lexicon, is unveiled deliberately and deftly. Clearly, Rose and Johan wouldn't surrender anything less.
DJUSTIN's existence seemed to crystallize due to the forces of quantum entaglement, a pull of energies which was always inevitable. At many points in their personal lives, Johan and Rose had walked separate but strangely parallel paths. The Swedish-American pair were both born as middle children in the same year, exactly 13 days and an ocean apart. Both spent their musical formative years finding footing in remarkably different settings; Johan grew up in pastoral Ǻhus, Sweden, while Rose grew up in suburbs outside the birthplace of techno, Detroit, Michigan.
Connecting through a shared admiration of each other's early bands in the late 1990's (Johan in Club 8, Rose in Shoestrings), the two first reached out to each other via handwritten letters and discussed everything from likes, musical aspirations and relationships. This had established a friendship that would ebb and flow, though now virtually, over nearly two decades.
In early Fall 2015, Johan was intent on finding a lyricist who could not only sing but also fully understood his very specific musical aesthetic. Rose came to mind quickly. - "We had never met before we started making music together so I didn't know what to expect. But as soon as we started writing together, magical things happened.", Johan says.
Shortly after Rose had agreed to come on board as co-writer for the project, the two arranged a long overdue, in-person meet-up in Stockholm. It felt like old souls were finally reunited and stars were aligning; the timing was right, the chemistry was right, and so DJUSTIN materialized from the ether.
Rose reflects, "Unlike previous projects I've done, writing for DJUSTIN has been a wholly intuitive process for me. I feel that every song Johan sends me to write for carries an intent and energy of its very own, and my task is to translate that energy into a narrative everyone can connect with. I see our finished songs as sacred space between us. No matter the distance, we give pieces of ourselves, and the songs manifest themselves into something only the two of us can create together as DJUSTIN. It is deeply intense and life-affirming."
PRESS
"Djustin capture love from afar in the shimmering ‘Stars’" SPIN
"This Is The Best Synthpop Song You'll Listen To All Week” NYLON
"A sensual collaboration of jingling synth-pop and affective melodies." THE FADER
" …drawing you in the second the beat touches down. ” BAEBLE MUSIC