Alunageorge are a British electronic duo who rocketed to fame with their first top-40 entry in 2013, a collaboration with Disclosure on ‘White Noise’. With the release of their last album, *Body Music *they landed another top-40 entry with single ‘Attracting Flies’. In January 2016 the duo unveiled their single ‘I’m in Control’ featuring Jamaican artist Popcaan and that same day Annie Mac on BBC Radio 1 revealed their second album title, I Remember.

The band use a compilation of R&B, bass, garage, dubstep, experimental hip-hop and advanced polyrhythmic beats to create a ‘futuristic pop’. AlunaGeorge's album I Remember is out September 16, so we speak to Aluna to get the skinny on what to expect:

**How AlunaGeorge's new album, I Remember, is different to the first: **

“The difference is that the song writing is coming from a more personal place. The stories that I was writing for ‘Body Music’ are a little bit more removed from me, so it might be about a friend or somebody I’d met, always a real story. It was always easier for me to get perspective in the writing process if it was someone else’s story, but now I’ve grown my skills so that I can actually do that with my own stories.”

**What the album themes are: **

“Well, there are a lot of different themes. With ‘I’m in Control’ that’s really about a woman understanding and discovering what she wants in life and in the bedroom, and to be able to actually have confidence to say it. And then with other songs like ‘Not above Love’, that became a really great process to understand one of my past relationships. To really see it for what it was, and it’s a way of giving me a way of getting out of the funk that it leaves you in.”

Aluna on control in the bedroom:

“Through my own observations and speaking to my friends, I noticed that there was a little bit of a lack-lustre vibe around really saying what you want in the bedroom, as if it would kinda kill the vibe. So I tested it out, and it didn’t. It did not kill the vibe at all, it made everything better, and so I thought, ‘well there needs to be a celebratory song about that’. So I wrote ‘I’m in Control’.”

**Where Aluna gets her style from: **

“My style comes from the melting pot of my class and cultural experiences. In my personal life, I come from both a working class and a middle class background, so I have those conflicting values going on. Having lived in London, what we are living in now is the aftermath of the height of punk and Laura-Ashley culture, together. I find it interesting that both punk and the brand Laura Ashley came to its absolute peak in 1985, I missed that but seeing it as a kid, just sort of general pop culture and I’m intrigued to see where the cross-over of flowers with DMs came from. Half of the time I’m drawn to gothic, leather, Dc Marten boots and safety pins and black, and at the same time I want William Morris patterns and gold and royal purple and blue. Then I have to find a way of putting it all on my body somehow.”

**Why the electronic scene is so different in the UK: **

l think that electronic music is our best asset that we have at the moment. We still do Live bands but also our interests in very weird beats goes a long way for those all over the world. Especially for people like Skrillex, the kind of weird beats that people in the U.K are doing can be really inspiring. I don’t know why we have such an interesting, strange dance music, but if you look at Grime tempo and the push on those beats, it is quite different to hip hop even though the sentiment is similar.

**AlunaGeorge’s empowering mission statement: **

I often try to write an empowering mission statement into the song. If I’m dealing with an issue or problem that the character has in the song, I have to give the character a way out. I can’t, I just can’t leave the listener in that trouble. And I also can’t brush over it and be the kind of person who says ‘it’ll be alright, don’t worry’. I’m not that sort of person. So I will talk about real ways to move past something in a song.

**Why Aluna disagrees with the messages behind a lot of modern music: **

I think that there’s other music out there that’s really popular but that’s really quite detrimental to the psychology of thinking about women. And I really don’t want to contribute to that. So for example, I’m not just gonna write a song about a girl saying ‘I just really want you to fuck me, that’s all I want.’ Because I just think it’s too two dimensional. There’s already a fantasy of a woman who just wants to be used and thrown away for both women and men and I don’t think it’s healthy because I don’t think its sustainable. Because everyone is going to be woken up one day and think ‘actually, I’d like to be respected and loved for who I am.’”

**Who Aluna is listening to: **

“I’m actually listening to Frank Ocean; as is the whole world. I’m listening to him and also James Blake. It’s a hard thing to do to get through the whole of Frank Ocean’s album with my schedule as it is. What I feel like when I hear it is ‘I need to be in a bath, need to be at the beach’ or I need to be in some form of calm, quiet situation to fully embrace it. When I was preparing for a photoshoot yesterday, it was a really good time for laying out all of these pieces of clothing and hair and make-up and it was the calm before the storm. We got half way through it and that was good.”

Read more: Frank Ocean's new album, Blond, reviewed (spoiler: it was worth the 4 year wait)