Kraak & Smaak

One of the more prominent groups signed to the British imprint Jalapeno Records, the Dutch breakbeat outfit Kraak & Smaak earned repeated BBC Radio 1 exposure while drawing substantial audiences to their concerts and festival slots at Glastonbury, Coachella, Miami Winter Music Conference, and South by Southwest. The core trio—Oscar de Jong, Mark Kneppers, and Wim Plug—enlarges for live shows with the addition of vocalist Rose Spearman and bassist Marc Baronner; when appearing as DJs rather than a full band, they are accompanied by DJ Sargon. Hailing from Leiden in the Netherlands, the group issued its first recording in 2003 on Jalapeno Records, the Money in the Bag EP, whose title track received strong support from Annie Nightingale on her Radio 1 program. Further EPs appeared on the same label—Keep on Searching (2004), Set Fire to Disco (2004), Say Yeah (2005), Money in the Bag Remixes (2005), and One of These Days (2005)—before the band assembled its debut full-length, Boogie Angst (2005). That album gathered the earlier singles together with fresh tracks, among them the subsequent releases “Keep Me Home” and “No Sun in the Sky.” During the same period Kraak & Smaak built a reputation as a live ensemble, performed across the DJ circuit, and produced remixes whose strongest examples were later collected on The Remix Sessions (2007). Returning to the studio in 2008, the trio first released the That’s Our Word EP, which spotlighted the track “That’s My Word” featuring Stones Throw affiliate vocalists Dudley Perkins and Georgia Ann Muldrow, before unveiling the album Plastic People. With Ben Westbeech supplying vocals, the lead single “Squeeze Me” became the group’s most successful release to date, entering the Top Ten of the Dutch singles chart and receiving extensive Radio 1 airplay.