Available on 180g pink wax

Until recently, if you wanted to learn about DOMi & JD BECK—the internet’s most hyped jazz (etc.) duo—you had to visit their website, click on a rat playing saxophone, and read them in their own words, as a 12-year-old theoretical physicist (DOMi Louna) and a 6-year-old sheep investigator (JD Beck) who have been “gaining traction since summer of 2018 for their bodybuilding masterclasses.”

Let’s fix that. “My philosophy of life is don’t take shit too seriously,” says DOMi Louna, born Domitille Degalle. And that’s fair. But the vibrant world she and her right-hand collaborator have given us demands exploration. They reveal a bit more on their Instagram profiles, via clips of their jams, with JD on a simple drum kit and DOMi Louna on MIDI keys. She favors sounds that evoke ‘70s jazz fusion and the colorful blips of 2000s Pokémon soundtracks, while he tunes and plays his snare in ways that can sound electronic, channeling IDM and boom bap. Sometimes they’re stuffed into a bathroom and sometimes the drums are muffled by pretzels stacked on the hi-hat, or toilet paper tossed on the snare. Their long-awaited debut album—Not Tight, released on Anderson .Paak’s new label APESHIT in partnership with Blue Note Records—is an attempt to bottle the goofy magic.

DOMi & JD BECK’s music finds both humor and greatness in harmonic complexity, rhythmic shiftiness, and speed. Their earlier viral Madvillainy tribute sets Madlib’s “Meat Grinder” at about 200 BPM. Naturally, their album abruptly adopts and ditches tempos, toys with time signatures, and sneaks extra beats into bridges. They perform as if racing, with winking breaks and pivots, but NOT TiGHT is also more composed, featuring a handful of pop structures and moments of pretty restraint. It features the likes of Thundercat, whose deadpan funk is their closest antecedent, Herbie Hancock, Snoop Dogg, Busta Rhymes, Mac DeMarco, Kurt Rosenwinkel, and .Paak himself. They didn’t want the record to feel like jams. “People were telling us you gotta record a live album, do it like the old jazz greats,” JD says. “We don’t want a snapshot of what we do to be our art. We want something built. We wanted to do something new.”