Ontario natives Junior Boys have been good to late-night dancefloors. Thanks to remixes from Alex Smoke, Hot Chip and Carl Craig (his slow-building take on Like A Child even scored a Grammy nomination), many DJ sets have crescendoed with Jeremy Greenspan’s mesmeric vocals. Despite their other life on the dancefloor though, Junior Boys are best left untouched.

In 2006, the duo arrived fully-formed with debut album Last Exit, before bettering themselves two years later on So This Is Goodbye. Both records brought warmth and sophistication to synth-pop, with Greenspan’s voice as the centerpiece. Last month heralded the third Junior Boys album Begone Dull Care, introducing a little more stomp and sweat to their pristine palette.

With a wealth of material to draw from, it’s surprising Greenspan and his offsider Matt Didemus have never toured Australia. That’s set to change in September, though, with Junior Boys sitting pretty on the national Parklife lineup. ITM’s Jack Tregoning spoke to the vocalist and unashamed gear geek about his aversion to the easy route.

Hi Jeremy. You at home in Canada at the moment or out on tour?

I’m actually at my parent’s place! We live in the same city. We just finished a pretty monster North American tour – that was about six and a half weeks – so I’ve been home for about two days. Then we leave in a couple of days to do Europe, then back home, then Australia in September.

The new album Begone Dull Care has quite a disco groove to it; it has less of a wistful feel than So This Is Goodbye. Did you want the two albums to stand apart?

Well, yes and no. Yes in the sense that we’re very determined to not repeat ourselves, which sometimes your audience likes and sometimes they really don’t. At the same time, there’s no conscious choice that goes on where we discuss change; I think it comes naturally to us. The changes that occur are probably more apparent to everyone other than us. When you’re making music, as the time goes by you don’t notice these kind of shifts – much like when you’re growing up, you don’t notice the changes in yourself.

Did working with Morgan Geist on his album Double Night Time fuel any ideas for the Junior Boys record?

Yeah, I think so. Certainly knowing Morgan and his methods, he definitely has similarities to the way we work. He uses a lot of hardware instruments, effects and processors. In some ways we’re quite different though. He’s more meticulous than we are, but I think his meticulousness rubbed off on me a bit.

Some of the songs on his record sound closer to Junior Boys songs than others. Did you guys share the songwriting?

No, not at all. There’s one song where I minimally shared some writing, but it’s all his. Even the lyrics are his.

How often do you get to try something like that, where the lyrics come from someone else?

I’ve been asked to do it a few times and I usually refuse, because it doesn’t sound like fun. The only way I’ve done it before in a meaningful way is with Caribou. Recently I’ve done a little bit of work for the upcoming Mouse On Mars record. I’m more interested in doing mixing work for other people – not remixing so much, but working with people directly.

You mentioned that you and Morgan Geist share a love for vintage equipment. Was the new album a good chance to geek out with the analogue gear?

Some of it, but some of it wasn’t so vintage. There’s a great renaissance of outboard equipment going on at the moment and we used quite a bit of that. We’re still very limited in our resources though and I think that creates a bit of a Junior Boys sound. I wouldn’t want to overindulge too much.

There seem to more shades to your vocals on this album. Was that something you were pushing for?

Not particularly. The only thing I can say is that I might’ve been more confident. On this record I was definitely going for an incredibly dry vocal sound. My vocals are even more unaffected than on the last one – there are fewer vocal harmonies and very little processing. I’ve always liked the idea of doing electronic music with raw vocals. I felt everybody in electronic music felt their vocals had to be highly processed; that George Moroder, and Kraftwerk tradition of vocoding. There was always a conceit with us to keep the vocals human.

This is probably something you’re sick of talking about, but you had a bit of an equipment meltdown onstage at Webster Hall in New York earlier this month. Are there always a lot of variables in the live show?

[Laughs] There are! And we thought we had accounted for all those variables, with a system of redundancies. Everything conspired against us that night. On the whole, we tend to make the live show a little more difficult for ourselves than we have to. Having seen enough live shows of acts using real electronic instruments as opposed to using stereo backing tracks, I can notice the difference and I think other people can to. We want to keep it more live. But the more live it is, the more precarious it becomes.

Was that always your stance, to have the show 100 per cent live?

No, it hasn’t always been like that. When we started, it wasn’t like that at all. But we felt pretty foolish up there as a karaoke act. So we thought we could do this and try to pay for more flashing lights and spectacle, or try to actually be a live band. Which seems to me the more honest option.

Your songs generally have quite an intimate feel. Is that a challenge to communicate in a live setting, or is it just about beefing them up?

On this tour, we’ve definitely beefed them up considerably. This tour has been catering more to a dance audience than we have in the past. In my ideal world, we would play two halves of a set: start with our more ballad-y stuff and move to upbeat stuff. At a festival, we show up and people don’t quite have it in their minds what we do. Our set-up is so complicated to get going in a short window of time!

Junior Boys mixed the sixth entry in the Body Language series last year, and you do DJ sets around the place. Is DJing a nice release from the equipment-heavy live show?

It can be. There’s not the same pressure and stress, but it’s also less fun. I like DJing, but I don’t have much respect for it. It’s just playing some records. Unless you’re some incredibly gifted mixer, I don’t think of it as an art [laughs].

Begone Dull Care is out now on Domino through EMI. Junior Boys will play Parklife around the country during September and October:

Sat 26th Sep – Botanic Gardens & Riverstage, Brisbane
Sun 27th Sep – Wellington Square, Perth
Sat 3rd Oct – Birrarung Marr, Melbourne
Sun 4th Oct – Kippax Lake, Moore Park, Sydney
Mon 5th Oct – Botanic Park, Adelaide

inthemix is a proud presenting partner of Parklife in 2009! Keep your eyes peeled to our Festival Page at inthemix.com.au/parklife