Depressed Billionaires have released their new album, Premium Fantasy.
Brothers Ian and Winn O’Donnell grew up in Omaha, Nebraska in a rich art and music scene that birthed Saddle Creek Records and bands like Cursive, The Faint and Icky Blossoms. After relocating to Brooklyn, NY in 2004 they started releasing a handful of EP’s on smaller labels such as Melbourne’s Idiot House, Classic NYC house label Nervous and more recently did a remix for Dave Sitek produced band Icky Blossoms. After smaller releases they forged ahead with their first full-length Club Paradise, which they self released in 2012. In New York City, they continued to immerse themselves in music; creating the lush soundscapes that makes up their new album, Premium Fantasy.
Over two years in the making, Premium Fantasy is an emotional journey, one that combines analogue and digital music through the ebbs and flows of their lives. Drawing on inspiration outside dance music norms like John Talabot, Bjork, Tycho, Everything But The Girl, Beck, and Fleet Foxes they set out to make something new and different. Underground techno stalwart Mark Verbos mastered the album in between building analogue synths for NIN and running his studio. Now with half of the group based in San Francisco, they figured out a songwriting system that works well.
“We’ll send demos back and forth over months and develop them, and then each song has its own timeline and story and process,” Ian explains. “Even though there’s a continuity to our sound, we try to be open to different processes in making music. Working on trivial details in our music becomes a joy. Riding that tight rope between broken and fixed, strange and perfect.”
Standout tracks like “Nectar,” “Sunset Strip” and “Goodnight,” and the accompanying artwork paint a beautiful picture swollen with meaning.
“The name Premium Fantasy came from the scene in the movie Lost in Translation when a call girl is sent to Bill Murray and she refers to what she offers as “premium fantasy.” So in finding that phrase funny, and subtracting the source, we set out to find images from friends that we thought were indicative of something abstract from a fantasy. We sent many of those images to graphic designer Xiang Lan, and after treatment, design and then typographical treatment, the result was our cover and the accompanying booklet.”
“Our biggest aspiration was to have a self produced album that wasn’t controlled by any organization or pre-existing culture, but merely our own creativity,” Winn adds. “In self-releasing an album, we were free of any constraints.”