JJ

The Swedish pair Elin Kastlander and Joakim Benon, recording as jj, first surfaced in 2009 on Gothenburg’s Sincerely Yours imprint. Their neo-Balearic indie-pop approach blended Air France’s tropical haze, the Tough Alliance’s taste for slyly irreverent appropriation, and the Honeydrips’ delicate twee-pop melodicism, yielding a lush, softly electronic sound that evoked prime-era Saint Etienne while adding a smoother, beach-inflected gloss. A pronounced hip-hop thread also ran through the music, audible in the sampling of Lil Wayne’s “Lollipop” for the track “Ecstasy” and in covers of material by T.I., Dr. Dre, and additional artists, most prominently on the 2010 Kills mixtape. Early on, jj mirrored their labelmates’ preference for enigma, cultivating an artfully elusive public image that left almost no online trace of the members’ identities or histories; the female singer, initially credited only as “Elin,” nevertheless stood out through her warm, richly smooth alto. The sequentially titled 7-inch jj Nº 1 and the full-length jj Nº 2 both arrived in spring 2009. Following a shift to the American label Secretly Canadian, the third album, jj Nº 3, appeared in March 2010. In 2011 the duo issued collaborations with Ne-Yo and Don Trip as well as a Yves Saint Lorentz remix of Rebecca & Fiona’s “Bullets.” Two further projects reached listeners in 2012: the two-track single jj Nº 4 and the High Summer EP. After a largely inactive 2013 that yielded only the Adrian Lux collaboration “Wild Child,” jj resurfaced in August 2014 with V, their third and most straightforward album to date.