Dragonette

Dragonette's Martina Sorbara

You can hear it in last year’s “Dreams,” the way that nobody else does effervescent hooks and vibes with such protean verve. It’s helped define Martina Sorbara’s career and the concept of Dragonette — her means of dealing disco and compelling asses to shake since the late Aughts — and it’s made her voice a reliable dance-floor touchstone many jams over on hits like “Hello,” “Pick Up the Phone” or “Outlines.”

Sorbara spoke with the Scene via Zoom the week she released Dragonette’s new album with electronic duo The Knocks, a sci-fi concept record called Revelation. (Revelation closes with an exceptional take on The Who’s “Let My Love Open the Door.” ) Dragonette and The Knocks will play Saturday at Nashville Pride. 

It’s fascinating in that, including the previous incarnation of Dragonette as a band — and regardless of the incredible array of collaborators, producers and remixers that you’ve worked with — you have such a consistency of voice. And by that I mean both the tones that you make while singing and what you’re saying with lyric and melody. And that seems in sync with how you’ve evolved and shifted the project along the way.

I don’t know what pieces of my brain changed, but I just kind of woke up and understood that I had a broad expanse of influences and musical desires, and none of them should be off-limits. Previous Dragonette records were always diverse, but finding and feeling my autonomy put me onto a very freeing journey. And when it comes to working with DJs and producers and finding the sounds, it’s always tied into what the music is telling me. And that process, especially now, is so rewarding and freeing. And this project is a great example of that — just pulling on a string with some old friends and seeing what happens. And what happened is very exciting. 

You’ve worked with The Knocks through the years in various contexts. Was the idea with this record to just throw open the gates and make something wild and conceptual? To make an album?

Actually, no. We’ve just been writing a lot; we learned to write remotely during COVID, and I had just taken a track they’d sent me and written a song on that. It just kind of snowballed from there, and we weren’t even sure what we were going to do with it. It was never a case of, “Guys, let’s go big and make an album,” but more a realization that, “Hey, it really feels like we’ve been making these songs, and they feel like an album, and we can do something really interesting with it.” And at first it was just an EP, but it kept growing.

How did Drag Race alum Aquaria get involved? You had initially worked with her on the 2019 track “Slow Song.”

When I wrote “Love Me Alive,” which was the first song that really made it all click, it felt like such a continuation that I went and screen-grabbed from the “Slow Song” video and recut it to “Love Me Alive,” and I was like “Look, it’s perfect.” And it planted a seed.

And now you and The Knocks are coming to Nashville as part of this year’s Pride celebration.

I’m so excited! I haven’t been to Nashville in a long time. And experiencing Pride parties and festivities in different cities is always exciting. It’s an opportunity to show how much love and fun can be spread across the world. … The more the merrier. 

Especially given a lot of the rhetoric of this spring, how does it feel as a Canadian artist being here?

It’s really heavy, and it really has affected our feeling of community with our continental neighbor. For the U.S., that conversation has probably ebbed some, but for us it hasn’t. When I come to the U.S., it’s in the spirit of what binds us all as people going through very intense and crazy times together.

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