The East Coast meets West Coast. LUNDØN and Loveless reconnected to for their latest release, “Don’t Turn This Car Around“. The song was two years in the making — and the wait was worth it.
Based in New York City, the DJ/producer duo consists of Jeff Updike and Justin Peeling, who met about a year ago through a mutual friend. LUNDØN started as a solo project by Peeling, while Updike was still producing under his stage name Strvylight.
“We started talking about doing some work together, which led to us working on ‘Whoever’s Next‘ together. Shortly after that, Justin asked me to officially be part of LUNDØN and make the project a duo. I was instantly on board,” Updike recounted.
Both artists have a musical background rooted in the punk-rock scene.
Growing up, Peeling learned to play the guitar at 14 and became very interested in the Vans Warped Tour scene. He listened to bands similar to Kiss. By the time he turned 18, he formed his first band, Lifelines, which would later become Nerv and go on to be a huge success. In addition to rock music, Peeling also has been influenced by both hip-hop and EDM artists, including Juice WRLD, The Chainsmokers, and Krewella.
Updike has been producing music for the past decade, which was kickstarted by “mainstream” EDM. He draws inspiration from Kill the Noise, Koan Sound, Apashe, Mefjus — just to name a few. His extensive background in punk and metal music helped him learn to produce dubstep, drum and bass, melodic dubstep, and trance. With his impressive self-taught skills, he landed a gig to ghost produce for a big name DJ. Updike’s works and performances continue to turn heads.
Combining their background punk rock with their passion for EDM, LUNDØN explained: “We try to approach songwriting in its most bare-bones form and let the instruments we love carry the tune into whatever direction we’re going. A distorted guitar has very specific energy when you hear it and we would try to capture that in our productions. The way we like to think about it is using rock instrumentation to write a dance song, go as far with that as we can, and then fill in the rest with the EDM elements.”
In 2018, Loveless introduced the idea for “Don’t Turn This Car Around” to Peeling, but the collaboration was put in the back burner. The idea came to life when Updike joined Peeling to transform LUNDØN into a join project. Peeling reworked the song and put a twist. They shared how the process went:
“We got the vocal stems from Loveless and there was a bassline that we were just absolutely crazy about. We started working on it and had a bit of inspiration from Tame Impala and wanted a bit of an indie vibe that eventually evolved into a more melodic EDM tone. It was kind of tricky to get the transition between the two styles because we wanted the stylistic change to be something that only happened one time, for what I guess you could call some contrast. We’re really into blending multiple genres of music and we took a big leap with making the song do a 180 at the end to catch the listener off guard, but in a way that hopefully wasn’t jarring.”
Their newest track is as relatable as it gets, especially during this unique time. The guys are remaining optimistic as much as possible during the pandemic, trying to make the best out of the situation.
“Prior to COVID, life seemed to be going 100 miles an hour and when it hit, everything kind of came to a screeching halt. We’ve been making the best of it by using the extra free time to experiment musically, work on some new projects, and really just use the downtime to really take a breather and reflect on what’s important to us and what kind of message and feel we want our music to have,” the duo expressed.