It’s proving difficult to convince David and Stephen Dewaele of Soulwax to read Alex Van Halen’s 2024 memoir Brothers, no matter how hard I play the “siblings who make music together” card. “I did the very modern phenomenon of not reading the book, but listening to every interview he did, so I feel like I read it,” says David. “We want to go back and hang out with David Lee Roth,” adds Stephen. “The beginning of the ’80s, that band is pretty much on it. Van Halen was one of the first records, when I was eight or nine, that completely blew me away. What a force, that band. Them being brothers has always been a thing with us. We’re huge fans. They’re our guilty pleasure.”
There’s nothing to feel guilty about when it comes to Van Halen, I assure the Dewaele brothers. They share this love of the band with Igor and Max Cavalera—the founders of São Paulo thrash-metal icons Sepultura—who play in Soulwax’s live band. “Igor and Max come from Brazil and have a different take on what metal is,” says Stephen. “I also feel Alex and Eddie coming from a Dutch-Indonesian heritage gives them a different outlook on their music. David and me being from Belgium, it’s also different. It allows you to have a better perspective. You’re less attached to the rules. You can color next to the lines.”
The twice GRAMMY-nominated duo is speaking from their studio in their hometown of Ghent, the headquarters for their many ventures: their band incarnation, Soulwax; their selector guise, 2manydjs; and their label, DEEWEE, where they produce and mix every artist on their roster. It’s also where they broadcast their multimedia project, Radio Soulwax, to the world. The space feels familiar, as it’s described in the many interviews conducted with Soulwax. I recognize the formidable vinyl collection from which yellow tabs stick out (“They’re categories,” David explains).
The brothers are very settled in this accessible and very walkable town that isn’t top of mind when thinking of Europe. Prior to the pandemic, they lived between Ghent and London, but once they were landlocked, got girlfriends, and became fathers, they committed to their roots. “Sometimes it’s annoying to be here, sometimes it’s amazing to be here,” says Stephen. “We’re very fortunate that we were in Miami this weekend. We’re off to London tomorrow, then to Paris. It’s not like we’re living in New Zealand. If you draw a circle through Paris, Cologne, Amsterdam, and London, Ghent is in the middle, an hour away from each. Those four cultures—French, German, Dutch, English, Flemish—are very different. We grew up with all those and we were definitely influenced by them.”
The night before this interview, I went to sleep watching the 2008 Soulwax documentary Part of the Weekend Never Dies. Waking up to the 2025 version of the Dewaeles is like being in a science fiction movie. They are older, yes, but they’re so much wiser. “The biggest change hasn’t been us, but maybe the world,” Stephen offers. “That feeling of inhibition that crowds used to have feels like it might not really be around. People are so much more aware of themselves.”
This is an interesting observation and one that, in a way, plays into Despacio, the duo’s immersive party as 2manydjs with LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy which makes the rounds at select festivals, including recent stops at III Points in Miami and Portola in San Francisco. Enclosed in an (usually) air-conditioned tent, the pitch-black interior of Despacio with its massive, custom-built sound system feels like a parallel universe. Entering it at This Ain’t No Picnic in 2022 was like going through a portal. The heat and discomfort outside vanished and the groove-driven music was transcendent. The other day a friend said about Despacio at Coachella, “I could live there forever.” This is a widely shared sentiment by people who attend festivals solely for Despacio.
“A big part of what we do is blending the acoustic and the electronic. That energy is hard to beat—especially when what we see is a lot more people staring at laptops.” — David Dewaele
“It’s where we get to play the stuff that we wouldn’t be able to get away with in another environment,” says David. “We can really push the limits of what is danceable, which you wouldn’t be able to do in most modern club environments. It’s become a real pilgrimage for certain people. It’s surprising, because we’re not doing anything different than we did 10 years ago, but it seems to have really caught on with a certain group of people who became fanatics. They travel everywhere to experience it.”
“We’re not aware of it that much, because we don’t really venture into the crowd,” adds Stephen. “But I did in Miami, because we were adjusting something, and I just felt like I’ve entered a whole different world. I had to get under the disco ball to listen, and I was surrounded by people with all this bootleg Despacio merch. It’s also a beautiful thing because the three of us get to spend time together and play crazy music that we like, and people come along for the ride. We have to be grateful for that.”
“We don’t get to see anything else from the festival,” David adds. “We’re just in our little world. It doesn’t make sense financially, but we’re fortunate that some festivals make it work.”
While the extended Despacio sets run the gamut of genres and eras from Lee “Scratch” Perry dub classics to Kraftwerk’s experimental electro, Jeff Mills standard-setting techno productions to Inner City’s “Good Life,” not a lot of Soulwax material—if any—finds its way into 2manydjs’ choices. Still, snippets from Soulwax’s latest album, the recently released All Systems Are Lying, were picked up on by the duo’s devoted fans who saw the tunes evolve over the course of roughly two years. “We were frustrated a little bit with the fact that we kept working either with or for other people,” says David. “It’s still creative, but we wanted to have some time for ourselves. It coincided with the fact that we were asked to tour. When we tour, we want to make new music. It’s a fortunate position in that we can try stuff out and then amend songs. It’s a process that really helps.”
The album took shape in between the brothers working on Marie Davidson’s album City of Clowns, making the soundtrack to the Netflix film Banger, creating music for fashion shows, completing a few remixes (their 2005 remix of Daft Punk’s “Robot Rock” will be released at the end of November as part of the Human After All Remixes album), and gigging. All Systems Are Broken is built from a combination of modular synths, tape machines, and live drums with processed vocals that nod to the sounds of the 2000s. It captures the excitement of Soulwax’s live shows, including their three drummers. “A big part of what we do is blending the acoustic and the electronic,” says David. “That energy is hard to beat—especially when what we see is a lot more people staring at laptops. For the live show, we thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be just better if we triple that?’ It’s three times as difficult. It’s a hard thing to nail. But the end result takes it out of the realm of electronic music.”
“We’ve always been rock kids, we’ve never considered ourselves a dance band. We’re just indie kids who started using electronica.” — Stephen Dewaele
Playing in the rock realm has served Soulwax well. They worked with producer Chris Goss, Dave Sardy, and Flood, respectively, on their first three albums. While Sardy returns on All Systems Are Lying as the mixer for “Hot Like Sahara,” it’s been decades since those early collaborations. Still, the brothers credit these producers with helping shape Soulwax’s sound, which they’ve self-produced since the mid-2000s. “We’ve always been rock kids, we’ve never considered ourselves a dance band,” says Stephen. “We’re just indie kids who started using electronica. Those three people were very instrumental in helping us find what we were really looking for. In a way, they helped us by saying, ‘Guys, I think you can do it better yourself.’ We have a huge gratitude for all three of them, because they took us under their wings. We already had some of the electronic, maybe new-wave DNA in us. We were trying to be an indie rock band, which we were also not really good at. It allowed us to find our voice.”
This is also the role the Dewaeles take on for the artists they produce (notably including the aforementioned Marie Davidson, Charlotte Adigéry & Bolis Pupul, and the brothers’ own krautrock ensemble Die Verboten), trying to help them find a sound that only they can create. Their focus for All Systems Are Lying, however, was to not be too rigid about their creative choices. Says David, “We wanted to be very intuitive and see instinctively what came out of us. We were trying to see what happens if we don’t set any sort of cerebral, dogmatic limitations.”
And while these songs won’t be heard in their 2manydjs’ sets, they are primed for Soulwax live. “Each of those things—remixes, Despacio, 2manydjs, Soulwax—seem to be economies where we can do specific things with our music or somebody else’s music,” says Stephen. “Doing a score for a movie or a fashion show or an ad, they’re very different disciplines. I wouldn’t want to be doing one exclusively all the time. They only work with us if we have these other escapes. We’ve created these worlds in which we can do all these different aspects that have something to do with why we fell in love with music.” FL
