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Both of them were delighted by the concept of sneaking complexity under a commercial surface, and so in addition to the downy sweetness of ’00s radio pop, Details has the slippery textures of electronic music, the sonorous opulence of classical, and the melancholia of trip-hop. “There was an ‘NSync song that sounded like Aphex Twin produced a boy band,” Sigsworth recalls. “I loved stuff like that, and it was a matter of how much we could get away with.” Nights of clubbing in East London, where drum’n’bass legends like Goldie and Aphrodite would play, seeped into their beats—like in the shuffling patter of “Let Go,” or the two-step skip of “Must Be Dreaming.”
“There is an unashamed intelligence in their music,” says the techno producer Jon Hopkins, who got his start playing keyboard for Heap during the I, Megaphone cycle. “There’s no question that Details was the most influential thing for me in my early 20s. I was just making crap versions of that.”
Heap and Sigsworth reveled in a kind of computational geekiness. Details got its title from the tiny blocks of sound they’d meticulously program and arrange in Pro Tools, which would sprawl into wild shapes. “I remember we worked so long on ‘Let Go,’ creating this kind of mosaic. Then one day, Immy says, ‘Have you noticed if you step back from the screen it spells ‘COCK’?” Sigsworth remembers, laughing. Proudly digital, the duo even inserted clicks into waveforms to create the illusion of audio files bumping into each other, inspired by experimentalists like German electronic trio Oval, who would slice CDs with knives to create glitches and skips. They were also compelled by remixes, and tried to recreate the uncanny feeling of a vocal melody floating above the instrumental; they’d wait to add beats until the very end of production, or write a melody so it’d never land on the home note of its key. “It was wanting to know that the vocal could go wherever it wanted,” Sigsworth said, “and it didn’t have to be dragged along by the music.”
All of this seems prescient, as Heap’s vocals did travel far beyond their original songs. Last year, Frou Frou received a new burst of attention after what was essentially a nightcored, drum’n’bass flip of their unreleased demo “A New Kind of Love” went viral, appearing in a famous Fortnite player’s stream and causing multiple versions of “A New Kind of Love” to spread on TikTok. (Frou Frou officially released the song this year.) In the song, Heap sings about a love that’s supercharged, so perfect as to feel “genetically altered.” Her voice cascades in the chorus in a way that feels like freefall: “Are you fa-ll-ing-in-love?” It is wispy and aerodynamic but also grounded, felt in the body like a sharp gasp. She rides syllables, leaping and plunging in a marvelous exploration of her range: EEE-oh-EEE-oh-Na-Na.