MELT Exclusive: Dorio

Photo Credit: Katherine Squier

Dorio’s indie-pop experimentations— and their unerring commitment to their distinctly firm and wistful aesthetic— have defined their sound since the project was merely an idea in the creative mind of founder Chad Doriocourt. But when he brought his partner, Rachel Rascoe, in as a collaborator, the project underwent a drastic evolution.

Doriocourt’s penchant for nostalgic, intricate production and Rascoe’s blissful melodies and striking lyrical abilities combined, on Super Love 3, to create a form of ecstatic, analog revelry. Now, on their newest project Agent Friday & the Perfect Angel, Dorio has found a new set of visual and sonic totems to crystallize their efforts upon.

Inspired by spy films from the ‘80s and ‘90s and the intentional simplicity in works like Madonna’s Ray of Light, the project’s 11 tracks tell a story of two detectives pursuing their ‘enemies’ and alter egos, Agent Friday and the Perfect Angel, playing on themes of self-discovery while tumbling across the saccharine synths and guitar rhythms that have become the calling card of the pair’s creative efforts.

I caught up with Dorio on their stop at The Sinkhole in St. Louis, joined by live bandmate Clare Drummond, to talk about their new project and the development of their creative partnership since the release of Super Love 3.

This transcript has been lightly edited for the sake of brevity and clarity.

I just want to start by asking how has tour been so far? You guys got started on Monday, right? 

[Chad] Yeah, started on Monday. It's been fun. It's been our first time hitting the Midwest, so all these cities for the most part are new to us until we get to New York. So with each city we're trying to figure out what the vibe is. It's been good so far.

[Rachel] It feels very freeing to be on tour because we moved out of our house that we've lived in for nine years in Austin right before this. The day we left for tour was actually the day that we locked the door. It’s kind of crazy.

[Chad] We have nothing to go back to in Austin.

[Rachel]  I feel like that was kind of an intense beginning, but it was also a nice clean slate.

[Chad] Being on the road, it's kind of an opportunity to breathe a little bit. I think the idea of going on tour and moving on the same month was fun five months ago and then reality hit the past two weeks. But it's been great. It's been fun.

We're testing out some new songs on the road because we have a new album coming out, and it'll be the first time we've been on tour where the album comes out while we're on the road. So it's been cool to be on stage and be like, ‘Hey, we have our new record for sale!’ That's kind of a new experience for us.

And what’s the most interesting or random thing that’s happened on your stops so far?

[Chad]  I decided this tour, I'm gonna have show pants [laughs]. I'm gonna wear the same pair of pants every night. I put them on, and these pants don't have any pockets. So I put them on in front of the venue yesterday, and this guy came walking by me and Clare as we were in the van and he said ‘No pocket, no problem,’ and then lifted up his shirt and he had a laptop in his waistband, but he also had pockets. Did he clock that I didn't have any pockets?

But then like an hour or two later, we were like, ‘Wait, was that our laptop?’ Because we have all of our gear in the van; we'd just loaded in, and it was kind of chaotic. That was in Kansas City.

So you mentioned that you're playing some songs off the new project on tour— is your set mostly composed of tracks from ‘Agent Friday’?

[Chad] Yes. So we kind of sandwiched the middle of our set with the new songs. But it's been kind of cool because we're four albums into Dorio. So I feel like this was the first time on tour where it's like, ‘Alright, What songs are we not gonna play?’ Just because we have so many songs that we can play, so we can kind of do, at least in our head, the greatest hits, you know? We've been kind of choosing our most fun songs to perform live from the past records and then some of the new ones too.

We played one or two shows before going on tour where we tested out some of the new songs. Four shows in, it's kind of fun to just play these new songs more often and get more comfortable with it.

I hope you don't mind me being too frank with the question, but it seems like there’s a pretty crystallized concept behind the new record. Would you mind explaining it to me?

[Rachel] The two singles that just came out the other week were called “Perfect Angel” and “Chasing Agent Friday”. We wrote those two songs separately from each other. Then I was sending them to Chad, and we had been watching a lot of spy movies. I think he had this really strong vision with “Chasing Agent Friday” of a chase scene with some kind of mysterious characters, so from there, those kind of became the quote-unquote ‘bad guys’. Then for a lot of the visuals, like the album cover, it's these two detectives that are chasing them.

[Chad]  Yeah, it's two characters. The concept of it is that the detectives have these alter egos that are the other characters, so they're kind of the same person. It’s the internal mind and the external self or just the bad parts of yourself and also the good parts of yourself.

[Rachel] I think it all is the most crystallized in the “My Own Personal Racer” video.

[Chad] That's kind of when they have the ‘Spider-Man’ moment, and they walk up and look at each other. 

[Rachel] In the past albums, we’ve realized that Chad really likes to have visual totems that we're coming back to and DVDs playing on his screen while he's mixing. We were watching movies like Charlie's Angels, Austin Powers, The Conformist. We were influenced by a Millennium, super clean palette, like old tech silver stuff. It’s the kind of technology that we grew up with. 

A lot of that got solidified in doing photo shoots with Katherine Squier, where we had some props. We were traveling with some family, and Chad bought this briefcase that was at an antique store that ended up being in a lot of photos.

I think we have also developed strong collaborations with Katherine Squier, who takes our photos, and I feel like a lot of that got solidified in doing photo shoots with her— where we had some props. I feel like Chad also just is really good at instinctually sorting out that aesthetic. We were traveling with some family, and he just bought this briefcase that was at an antique store that ended up being in a lot of photos.

So it sounds, just from what I've heard of the project, like you’re going back a little bit to some of the simplicity and softness of ‘Strawberry Dream’ as opposed to some of the more technologified moments on ‘Superlove 3’. Was that an intentional choice? 

[Chad] I would say yes. I was really trying not to, especially with the production side of it, overthink stuff and not go through so many variations of songs, especially with the mix. Because I tend to do that a lot, so a totem of this album was Madonna and William Orbit— they worked on this album called Ray of Light together. But I read an interview that she had a phrase called ‘Don't gild the lily’, which translates to don't overwork a song. I wrote that down on a little notepad and put it on our desk, so anytime I'd maybe start to go down a rabbit hole of changing up something, there was something to keep my brain in check.

Was there any other way that you guys wanted to approach this record differently?

[Chad]  I think also it kind of goes along with that. Past albums have taken maybe two years to finish as far as  writing it, recording it, then prepping the release with our label Earth Libraries. But this one we wanted a super quick turnaround, so it was the fastest one we've ever done— just not overthinking stuff,  just trying to keep everything super concise and the timeline super short.

[Rachel]  I feel like the only reason we were able to do that is because we have these other Dorio albums that we feel unlocked the aesthetic or the format of how we're creating. And it feels like we're always figuring it out, but I thought we finally figured out how we like to send stuff back and forth to each other and collaborate. All of that stuff being set up allowed us to do it faster because there wasn't really a reason to do it faster. t just happened, but it also played into a lot of the themes that Chad was playing with and stuff about racing and chase scenes.

[Chad]  Rachel and I are also about to move out of our house, so it felt like we wanted to write one more album there, too. That was another reason to finish it up. As Rachel was saying, we kind of perfected our process of how to send songs to each other and how to co-write, especially in our current house So I wouldn't say it was easier than the other albums, but it was definitely, at least the process was,  a little less preparation and more just focusing on writing the song.

Can you provide any more specifics about how your process has evolved since ‘Super Love 3’?

[Chad] I'll say for myself, I got self-conscious when Rachel had a specific idea about something I was working on for a super long time. I started this project as a solo project in 2019 because I was in previous projects, and I just wanted to start something where, not that I have total control, but I just wanted to feel more comfortable with being myself. But over four albums, I've really grown to understand where Rachel is coming from with stuff.  I think our taste, once again going from four albums, have slowly morphed together. But we're still kind of perfecting each other's parts.

[Rachel] The conflict and the disagreements are more built into the experience. Instead of feeling like ‘Oh, this is going off the rails because we're disagreeing,’ it’s become more ‘This is what happens, and that always ends up being the edit that needed to happen.’ It’s always some sort of middle ground between what either of us suggested. If someone suggests something is wrong— that they don't like a certain part of the song— it's probably not really the suggestion that they're making that needs to be done, it's just something about that part or about that moment that is needing a different kind of attention.

[Chad]  I think that's what I really learned coming from previous projects and doing stuff with Rachel is, just because we're having a disagreement about something, doesn't mean that's a bad thing. It's actually a really good thing because we're hopefully getting into something better.

[Rachel]  I feel like, for me, it's more the security—just because I’ve been busy with some other, non-musical projects this week doesn't mean that I’m not gonna ever come back to this album and be part of it. We could both be doing different things and just be sending voice notes to each other, and it would all come together.

[Chad]  It’s been about figuring out when we should meet up and work on stuff and when we should just communicate via voice message, text, or email just so we don't get into this big discussion. Sometimes you just need a quick text— something needs to be adjusted or just an idea. Before we'd be like, ‘Alright, we're gonna  write a song tonight.’ And that's kind of overwhelming; I feel so ill-prepared just coming in cold. 

And how do you feel like you've grown specifically as songwriters or producers since the last album? 

[Chad] Speaking for myself, I think I've finally just been confident and not been afraid to just make music that I want to hear. With the first two Dorio albums, I was really trying to say, ‘How do I really get what's in my head out, and are people gonna like it’ 

And I feel like over that process, I just got better at hearing what I want to hear in my head. I obviously do want people to like the music that we create. I know it's so cliche, but if I like it, then other people will probably like it too. So just trusting what I like and then obviously bouncing stuff off with Rachel because we have very parallel music tastes. We also have very different music tastes, too. So just having Rachel as a songwriter and a production partner, as we've done this longer and longer, it's really just relying on that and trusting her.

[Rachel]  I just love writing vocal melodies and lyrics, but I think we didn't always know how to actually make those part of Dorio. It sounds silly because they have been for a lot of years, but the way that I was able to see how something that I write on guitar could become part of this project rather than just being pessimistic that it's not gonna be part of it was a major change. “Perfect Angel” is the only song that I feel like I've written more completely on guitar that has become a Dorio song, and that's because we were able to just have more trust about how it might end up production-wise.

Chad saying that about the house is nice because I think I had this problem where I was convinced I needed to record the ‘Rachel folk album’ before we got out of that house to feel like I've done my thing in there. But this album really became what that would have been; a lot of the lyrics and ideas that I thought would only work for that ended up on this project.

[Chad] For myself, I'd always be self-conscious whenever Rachel would bring one of her songs, whether it's for Dorio or just Rachel's personal songwriting catalog. I'd be so nervous that it wouldn't be able to be what she thought was good. I feel like this album, we finally got over that. Not being afraid of that being said.

Rachel’s songs where she's singing lead, those are always my favorite on the records that we do. And with this album, people that listen to Dorio are finally starting to get it. Not that we have Rachel and Chad songs, but it's very obvious we have songs where I'm singing or she’s singing lead. 

This one is mostly a curiosity question, but how did you choose the four lead singles for the album?

[Chad]  I think this is our biggest concept album, and “My Own Personal Racer” kind of creates the concept, especially with our music video that we did. That introduced the visual world of it and the sonic world of it with the synths. We used this monophonic synthesizer on it. That was used on pretty much every song on the album, so I wanted to showcase that one first because it sets up, lyrically and visually, the themes of the album. And then “New Energy,” the second single, that's just my favorite song on the record personally. So I was a big proponent of us releasing that one, and we did a music video for it. And then “Chasing Agent Friday” and “Perfect Angel” are kind of the theme songs of the two main characters.

[Rachel]  We did intentionally want to put those out like on the same day. 

[Chad] We wrote this so fast, it was really tough, at least from my perspective, to pick the singles because I'm still so on the songs. Sometimes in an album-writing process, I'm just so in the weeds of it. I don't know what I like and don't like. But because this is also fresh, it was really fun and kind of hard to get the singles. 

[Rachel] Chad’s been texting me every day, in all caps, lyrics to these songs. He's still in it.

[Chad]  That's why I really like our collaborative practice because I feel like we approach literally everything pretty differently, but we're always on the same road. I don't know how to make this metaphor work [laughs]; they’re parallel, but so far apart, but then we meet right in the middle always.