A year ago, Dan Snaith—who records and performs as
Caribou—planned a trip to the tiny country of Andorra. Nestled in
the upper reaches of the Pyrenees Mountains on the border between
France and Spain, Andorra, Snaith thought, would fit the lush and
romantic new material he’d been working on “down to the ground.”
“I kind of imagined Andorra would be the perfect physical home for
[the album],” he said. “But when I got there, the whole country was
basically a tax haven. Hence, it’s all shitty duty-free stores with
tacky souvenirs, cheap smokes, and the cheapest booze you’ll ever find
in your life—all in this amazing mountain landscape.”
While the record that would eventually be named Andorra was
recorded by Snaith alone in the modest confines of his London
apartment, the music suggested a sense of grandeur more in line with
the “forgotten, romantic mountain land, untouched by time” he expected
to find. Whereas his last full-length, 2005’s The Milk of Human
Kindness, veered from electro-infused hiphop instrumentals to
Neu!-inspired motorik, his new recordings gravitated toward an
unexpectedly coherent sound. Not only were they structured like more
conventional pop songs, they sparkled like classic ’60s psyche pop,
with heart-swelling emotion and baroque arrangements. Songs such as
“Sandy” and “Eli” burst with dizzyingly euphoric melody, rigorous sonic
detail, and a transporting wall-of-sound aesthetic. So even if the
version of Andorra that Snaith envisioned never existed in the first
place, the title turned out to be perfectly descriptive of his new
songs—sublime mountain vistas or not.
“I named the album that because, all of a sudden, my idea of Andorra
didn’t fit the place,” he explained. “When I’m recording, it’s very
much escapist music: escaping with this music into my head where it
means all sorts of things for me. So in the end, the title refers more
to this place—inside my head, I guess—that I imagined
Andorra would be.”