Long Awaited Debut

Dance music can be a precipitous beast, one month’s prince often becoming the next’s pauper.

It’s interesting then to note the remarkable consistency of Stanton Warriors. For almost 15 years the Londoners have been at the top of the game, a relentless dedication to the live arena garnering more and more fans. In fact, it’s only now that they’re putting the finishing touches on their first truly standalone album, which is all a bit weird for one half of the breakbeat duo, Dom Butler. â€œAh, yeah. I mean, it’s taken a while,” he laughs. “With any album, you can play the tunes out for a while, just fine tune them and stuff. I mean, we’ve had a lot of tunes to choose from, and when we’re playing live: that’s when you have to whittle it down.

“But the tunes for the album you just become numb to after a while. It starts to become ones and zeroes, like on a computer screen. And then you hear someone else play it you think, ‘Actually, it’s alright’. So, no, we’ve been doing DJ sets that concentrate almost exclusively on album stuff, and it’s been working – it’s going off – so that gives me a lot of confidence and faith in it all.”

A debut of sorts it may be, but that doesn’t mean the Warriors don’t know their way round the recording studio, and have even in the past had a longplayer primed, ready to go and then released, in a roundabout sort of way. â€œWe did put out ‘The Stanton Sessions Vol. 2’ a while back, and the second CD on there was an album we signed in 2001 with Universal Records and we didn’t release it there. It was a delayed old album that we sort of stuck on as a bonus. So you could argue that this is our first proper ‘album’ album.”

Undoubtedly slowing down the release has been the Warriors’ unrelenting tour schedule, which will see them once again touch down in Australia later this month. â€œWe’ve done Australian tours every year for a decade, I think,” Dom says. “Just to keep things fresh we always come back with a whole new sound. We’ve been doing a lot of road testing: club tracks and remixes and album tracks, and we definitely thought it was a good time to come back to Australia. Plus, it’s fuckin’ freezing here.”

Stanton Warriors play Breaks & Enter’s fourth birthday party at Barsoma, January 29. They also play the Great Northern, January 20.