Their combination of fuzzed-out audiences and moody soul mystified audiences in the 90s – but now pop music has finally caught up with them, two decades on

Daniel Chavis remembers the first time the Veldt were labelled “difficult”. Back in the early 90s, his North Carolina quartet had just recorded an album in London with Cocteau Twins’ Robin Guthrie, and their new A&R rep was unimpressed. “Other black bands were getting noticed, and every record company wanted their Living Colour,” says Chavis. “We didn’t fit into that mode. When it’s Kurt Cobain, it’s ‘He knows what he wants’, but we’re ‘difficult to work with’.”



As black artists whose sound owed as much to My Bloody Valentine as it did to Otis Redding, the Veldt were never universally embraced or understood. But in 2016, they’re less of an anomaly: the mix of shoegazing rock and moody soul they pioneered has been adopted by the likes of the Weeknd and Miguel. With new music on the way, they may finally draw attention to their body of work, which decades ago joined cultural dots the mainstream is connecting only now.

Still shoegazing: the Veldt play New York. Photograph: Supplied

The night after a gloriously noisy show in Toronto – their first in the city since opening for the Jesus and Mary Chain back in 1990 – 49-year-old Danny Chavis (guitar, coyote-fur coat) and Daniel (vocals, toque with ears reaching down to his knees) sit in a bar with their gnomic programmer/guitarist, Hayato Nakao. Daniel brings up the proto-punk band Death, which acquired fame after its guitarist succumbed to cancer. “Some nerdy white kid [says] ‘Oh, my dad found this 45,’ and now they’re huge. Do niggas gotta die to be famous?”

The brothers Chavis have been musical outsiders ever since they were both kicked out of their local church choir. Growing up, Daniel idolized both Prince and Ian McCulloch, and just like Echo and the Bunnymen, he and Danny started out playing with a drum machine. They fraternized with local bands in Chapel Hill’s alt-rock scene (Mac McCaughan of Superchunk joined on guitar for one gig), acquired a rhythm section and built a following. It was a heady time – Daniel gloated about their first deal to the high school principal who’d advised him to join the army – but also the beginning of a long struggle with record-label absurdity.

From Capitol (who shelved the record with Guthrie) to Mammoth (who released their debut EP, Marigolds, in 1992) to Mercury (who put out their album Afrodisiac in 1994), no one seemed to know how to market a group that didn’t even fit the stereotype of a black rock band. One A&R rep advised them to get a blonde bass player. Danny recalls: “We had to go out and make a project so this motherfucker could understand what we were doing. We had cut out pictures of bands we were interested in from magazines – I was like, ‘I know we’re niggas, but can you understand what we’re saying? Try looking at our faces, please?’” The label overcompensated by plastering their image everywhere. Says Daniel: “You remember how it was in the 50s, when a black artist had to put a white couple dancing on [a record]? It was like that. And when we went on tour, they had our pictures all over the wall – it was horrible.”

Mercury vetoed a European tour with Cocteau Twins in favour of a slog through redneck bars in the south-east with New Jersey’s the Smithereens. The Veldt put rebel flags on their amps as a joke; audiences neither clapped nor booed, but simply stared. It didn’t get much better – labels they approached in the late 90s told them they should try sounding like Lenny Kravitz. Eventually they agreed to a publisher’s request for a name change, emerging as Apollo Heights, with the more beat-driven album White Music for Black People (2007). Despite cameos from Guthrie, Mos Def and TV on the Radio’s Dave Sitek, it fell victim to lack of an appropriate commercial pigeonhole.

But it did, at least, earn the band respect. Chuck D hired them to back him up for a buzzing rendition of Fight the Power for Do the Right Things’s 20th anniversary at Lincoln Center in New York. Toronto-based producer Doc McKinney, who later helmed the Weeknd’s breakthrough mixtapes House of Balloons and Thursday, met Danny around that time. “Danny’s a very inspiring dude,” he says. “For black artists, doing anything outside of the bubble, beyond what’s derivative of what white kids are doing, being able to express yourself honestly, is not celebrated at all. So when I heard these guys, it gave me confidence.” He sees the band as fellow travellers, and progenitors of the layered, atmospheric guitars-and-beats sound now “the most influential new sound in R&B”.

Rebranded as the Veldt, they’re returning this year with two releases – an EP called The Shocking Fuzz of Your Electric Fur (18 March on Leonard Skully) and the album Resurrection Hymns (due this summer via sonaBLAST!) – that find them influenced by trap music and the kind of ghostly beats crafted for Drake. With Danny’s enveloping hooks, Daniel’s swooning falsetto and, on two tracks, their old friend Guthrie behind the desk, the new songs invite paradoxical praise: serenely assaultive, vertiginously soothing.

Creation records co-founder Joe Foster, who mixes one track, is effusive: a new wave of young shoegazer bands “have a great sound, but they’ve yet to snap into that focus of providing songs and the mood … At the moment, the field is clear for [the Veldt] to come in with it all fully formed. Someone will take them seriously, because they’ll hear them and think how fantastic they are.”

Says Daniel: “When Danny and I explain our story, people go, ‘Oh, you’re always a victim.’ They’re like, ‘Where has your vision gotten you?’ I just want to pay my rent. I don’t want to be famous; I don’t want to be popular. It’ll be like, ‘Oh yeah, I’ve heard of those guys before.’ I’m good with that.”

Danny adds: “A lot of young black cats write to us, saying, ‘Hey man, I’m glad to see you guys doing this.’ Them telling me that is success enough for me …” He smiles. “Sometimes.”