Despite it being a rather-voguish album lined with bruised lyrics of stark vulnerability sung over twinkling notes and sample-rich grooves, a few of the tracks gave off a “tranquilized” feeling akin to those of late 1990s trip-hop outfits, which the duo often mentioned as its references in interviews.

Its latest single, “This Feeling”, however, begs to differ as it shows the duo further exploring a dancier musical spectrum instead while steadily maintaining its quintessence.

Intrusive thoughts

“Initially, we wanted ‘This Feeling’ to sound more like [the songs from] Massive Attack’s Mezzanine album,” Clara Friska Adinda, one half of the duo who fills in all the vocal tracks for the band, told The Jakarta Post on Feb. 15. “Wraaang wraang wraang wraaaang,” she tried imitating the claustrophobic rushing sounds found in the 1998 album.

The duo found the early version of the song to be “a bit too dark. Like, ‘whoa’. I mean, it was exciting but it didn’t seem like the kind of ‘colorful’ White Chorus songs”, Adinda mused. The duo looked back to the demo that was made in 2021 (and was then left untouched ever since), which Adinda described as “joyful electronic songs”.

“We wanted [‘This Feeling’] to be loud,” added Emir Agung Mahendra, White Chorus’ other, equally significant half. Adinda and Mahendra admitted that they were both goaded by the rising punk and hardcore scenes in Bandung, West Java. “Yeah I think we were egged on by the guys who played in ‘bands’ [in a more conventional sense] with guitars. Ones that played seriously,” Adinda laughed.

“Like Bleach, Prejudice and Dongker. They were making their waves in the scene, so we thought of making electronic music with [loud] parts integrated [in the composition],” Mahendra named some of the bands that drove them in that way initially. “But it turned out to be a bit difficult, hard [...] it felt forced.”

The duo managed to shun away their intrusive thoughts and walk a path they deemed as better-suited for White Chorus, albeit still branching away from their 2021 debut. 

 

The turn

“This Feeling”, according to Mahendra, owes a lot of references from “like, PinkPantheress, or the UK 2-step [garage] songs that are only around two minutes, or one-minute long”. Adinda further noted that the single could be categorized as Jersey club, a style of electronic club music that emerged in Newark, New Jersey, the United States. 

It bears the style’s signature ear-numbing bass drum thumps, which the band fused together with Adinda’s almost-pixie-like breathy vocals and even the “bed-squeak” sample that was first used in Lil Jon-produced 2004 Trillville track “Some Cut”. 

The sample, which was an actual recording of the US rapper/producer Lil Jon rocking back and forth in what he described as a “cheap-ass old Office Depot chair” in a 2020 interview, became widely used even outside the genre. One of the latest songs to use the sample was Drake’s “Currents”, from his 2022 LP Honestly, Nevermind.

Jersey club turned out to be an inspiration for Mahendra and Adinda to rework the early, louder version of “This Feeling”. It got them out of a writer’s block they were experiencing after moving to Downtown Studio, a creative space off Jl. Mangga in Bandung. “We were really used to our home-recording setup,” said Adinda.

 

Pompous admirer

“Emir did most of the works in terms of the music though, for ‘This Feeling’,” said Adinda. The duo shared an almost-equal portion of work or both its music and lyrics. In developing lyrics together, one of them usually comes to the other with a set of “cool” words on hand that they take from “books, movies, maybe”, said Adinda. The other, then, would respond by looking for matching words and essentially finishing each other's sentences.

“For [the lyrics for] ‘This Feeling’, I think we were inspired by aku bisa membuatmu jatuh cinta kepadaku,” Adinda recited the lyrics to Dewa’s “Risalah Hati” (Treatise of the Heart). A pompous display of romantic prowess; yet, in “This Feeling”, narrated from a woman’s point-of-view.

“This woman was head over heels for someone. Whatever it takes,” said Adinda. “It's fiction, though,” she chuckled. In FASTFOOD, Mahendra and Adinda wrote the lyrics in a different way where they shared the responsibilities per song instead of going head-to-head in each of them. “Fifty-50, in terms of fact and fiction,” Adinda laughed.

She admitted that in their 2020 track “Telephone Call”, she wrote the lyrics based on her personal experiences. A method that, according to Adinda, would usually lead her to the “best lyrics” that she had ever written. “I meant my best,” she clarified with a chuckle.