Cut Copy are a band from Melbourne, Australia that formed in 2001 and deals primarily in electronic music.
It initially started out as a home-recording project by Dan Whitford experimenting with sampling machines in his spare time. While making the debut album Bright Like Neon Love, his sampling machine broke which led to him bringing in his friends Tim Hoey and Mitchell Scott to help finish the record. The album was released in Australia in 2004, and a year later started to gain some traction internationally which led to the trio having to put together a live set-up to tour the album.
In 2008, the band achieved breakthrough success with their second album, In Ghost Colours (America and the UK got it in 2009), debuting at #1 on the Australian album charts. It remains their most critically-acclaimed and well-known album to this day.
Around this time, the band expanded their line-up adding bassist Ben Browning as an official fourth member, and in 2011 released their third album Zonoscope, which took a more experimental direction by incorporating elements of world music. They immediately followed it up in 2013 with Free Your Mind, a more straightforward dance album heavily influenced by late-1980s house mixed with the ethos of 1960s psychedelia.
After a short break, they began work on their fifth album and released Haiku from Zero in 2017, where they returned to a more experimental approach bringing in some prog and funk elements into their sound. A documentary about some of the ideas behind the album called Don't Let Me Die Tonight
was released a year later.
Discography:
- I Thought of Numbers EP (2001)
- Bright Like Neon Love (2004)
- In Ghost Colours (2008)
- Zonoscope (2011)
- Free Your Mind (2013)
- Haiku from Zero (2017)
- Freeze, Melt (2020)
Members:
- Dan Whitford (vocals, synth, guitar)
- Tim Hoey (guitar, synth)
- Ben Browning (bass, synth)
- Mitchell Scott (drums)
This band provides examples of the following tropes:
- Album Title Drop: "Walking in the Sky" from Free Your Mind. Notably, it's also the only album of theirs that has a Title Track.
- Break Up Song: "Going Nowhere", "Far Away", and "Standing in the Middle of the Field".
- Concept Video:
- "Hearts on Fire" has Dan being followed by a Personal Raincloud after a breakup.
- "Take Me Over" is about a nerdy girl who builds a robot to defeat her bullies.
- "Free Your Mind" is about a guy played by Alexander Skarsgård trying to escape from a hippy cult.
- "Airborne" has Dan being stalked in a supermarket by a scruffy-looking guy with superpowers.
- Design Student's Orgasm: Dan studied to be a graphic designer, and has been responsible for all of the band's album covers (with the exception of Zonoscope, which is taken from a work by Japanese photomontage artist Tsunehisa Kimura).
- Early-Installment Weirdness: Bright Like Neon Love is definitely a lot more Daft Punk-influenced than their later work, and also has noticeably smaller production values.
- Even more so with the rare debut EP, I Thought of Numbers (which at that point was just Dan's home recordings), which are entirely instrumental.
- Epic Rocking: "Let Me Show You Love" (6.05), "Need You Now" (6.09), "Meet Me in a House of Love" (6.09), and "Sun God" (15:07).
- Fading into the Next Song: Most of their albums do this with the tracklisting.
- Four-Temperament Ensemble: Dan is choleric (the determined leader of the band), Tim is phlegmatic (the snarky heart of the band), Ben is melancholic (the most serious and musically proficient member) and Mitchell is sanguine (the upbeat, unpredictable joker).
- Intercourse with You: "Let Me Show You Love" could be interpreted as this.
- It Will Never Catch On: They never set out to achieve any kind of chart success and certainly never expected In Ghost Colours to get as big as it did. Reportedly, Dan's reaction to the album debuting at #1 was that of Stunned Silence.
- Lyrical Dissonance: Almost all of their songs are bright and upbeat musically, and yet some of them have some fairly melancholic lyrics if you really pay attention; examples of this are "Going Nowhere", "Far Away", and much of Haiku from Zero.
- Minimalistic Cover Art: Free Your Mind simply has the title on a solid blue background.
- New Sound Album: Pretty much every album.
- One-Woman Song: "Alisa".
- Perishing Alt-Rock Voice
- "Sesame Street" Cred: They appeared on Yo Gabba Gabba! performing a song specially written for the show called "Fantastic Voyages".
- Siamese Twin Songs: "That Was Just a Dream" and "Zap Zap" from Bright Like Neon Love.
- Surprisingly Gentle Song: A slight example; "Tied to the Weather", the closing track on Haiku from Zero. It has by far the most sparse, minimalistic production the band have ever done, although the instrumentation builds up towards the end. It sticks out like a sore thumb on the album, and many reviews have highlighted that particular song as the album's biggest stand-out track.
- True Companions: Despite nowadays living in completely different continents from each other, all four of the guys consider themselves to have a sibling-like bond.
