CHROMEO TAKE THE FUNK BACK TO THE DJ BOOTH / IT’LL DO / 12.19.26
Chromeo arrive at It’ll Do on December 19 for a DJ set, putting Dave 1 and P-Thugg back on the other side of the equation: not performing a Chromeo show so much as filling a club with the records and ideas that have been feeding one for more than twenty years.
– JAMBALOO EDITORIAL TEAM
Chromeo have spent two decades making extremely serious decisions about extremely unserious pleasures. Dave 1 and P-Thugg built an entire language from drum machines, talk boxes, impossible basslines, expensive-sounding synthesizers and songs about people behaving badly around one another, then somehow carried it from Montreal clubs to festival stages without sanding off the joke or the musicianship underneath it.
There is now a substantial catalog behind them. Fancy Footwork gave them “Bonafied Lovin’” and its title track; Business Casual brought “Night by Night”; White Women produced “Come Alive,” “Old 45’s” and “Jealous (I Ain’t With It).” Their most recent full-length, 2024’s Adult Contemporary, found the pair leaning happily into getting older without accepting that adulthood required becoming tasteful in the boring sense, with “(I Don’t Need A) New Girl,” “Lost and Found” and the La Roux collaboration “Replacements” keeping the machinery polished and the bass lines indecently functional.
The important words on the It’ll Do listing, though, are DJ set. Chromeo’s current schedule includes a run of these club dates in Hollywood, San Francisco, San Diego and Dallas, separating them from the full live-band version of the duo and putting the emphasis back on selection, mixing and the dance music that sits underneath everything they have made.
It’ll Do is particularly well suited to that version of Chromeo. There is no festival stage to fill and very little distance between the booth and the floor; the club’s entire proposition is essentially sound system, DJ and people willing to stay there for several hours.
That also means this should not be treated as a greatest-hits Chromeo concert with the instruments removed. The more interesting possibility is hearing where Dave 1 and P-Thugg’s record collections intersect with the music they have spent twenty years making — disco into electro, funk into house, old records into newer ones, and perhaps the occasional moment where it becomes difficult to tell which side of the booth Chromeo are actually on.
