‘There Needed to Be a New Above & Beyond Album, Or There Would Be No More Above & Beyond’: The Beloved Trio Are Back

In the sunlit boardroom of a sleekly understated West Hollywood hotel, the gentlemen of Above & Beyond sign hundreds of posters of themselves. The trio — Paavo Siljamäki, Tony McGuinness and Jono Grant — form an assembly line as they put their respective names (first, only) onto each image from the three inch stack, their silver Sharpies dulling from use.

Based in London (Grant and McGuinness) and Finland (Siljamäki) the guys are jet-lagged but a bit giddy from an interview they did earlier today with Apple Music’s Zane Lowe, an occasion they flew to Los Angeles for, and for which McGuinness says they were “incredibly nervous.” They’re one of the most beloved groups in dance music, yet they seem gobsmacked by the mainstream recognition.

That interview, and this one, are puzzle pieces of an album campaign that launched in March with the announcement of Bigger Than All of Us, the trio’s fifth studio LP in a catalog going back to 2006. The campaign hit overdrive three months ago with a primetime performance at Coachella’s Outdoor Stage, a promo cycle that compounds upon itself here on the glass conference table as they sign posters bearing an image of that show.

In it, the trio appear in miniature at the center of a giant circular stage rig, a huge digital full moon rising on the LED wall behind them and a sprawling audience ahead. What’s cut out from the image is the additional 40,000 people who were in the crowd that night.

“We went to the stage the night before at the same time and there were about 10,000 people seeing the band there,” says McGuinness. He thought A&B would pull a similarly sized crowd. He was wrong. They walked onstage and “I Iooked out and it was just one of those moments where you go ‘Wow,’” he says. “I think it was one of the most extraordinary gigs we’ve done, seeing the people going on forever.”

Given that A&B has been commanding giant crowds for upwards of 25 years, since coalescing in the U.K. in the Y2K era, that’s saying something. At Coachella, the trio debuted a handful of never-before-heard album tracks, ramping up to a place of anthemic ecstasy over the hour. Watching via livestream from his living room in Los Angeles, the album’s A&R Dave Dresden was observing closely.

“I could feel the tension in them when they started,” he says. “They started with a song nobody had ever heard before, and it wasn’t really crafted for the dance floor, but they won that crowd over in a way that I wasn’t even expecting.” By the end of the set, Dresden was crying. Given the heart-on-sleeve vibe that’s long been A&B’s signature, he likely wasn’t the only one.

Out today (July 18) Bigger Than All of Us is the group’s first entirely electronic album since 2018’s Common Ground. (2019’s Flow State is a continuous mix of ambient music made for yoga and meditation.) The plan wasn’t necessarily to wait seven years between albums, but when the pandemic hit, the guys were in different locations and each just went about making a solo project.

When the trio started touring together again post-pandemic “it quickly became evident that we needed new music, because we were playing mostly old stuff,” says McGuinness. “It was like there needed to be a new Above & Beyond album, or there would be no more Above & Beyond.”

“If you don’t keep going, you sort of become a legacy act,” says Grant. “It was like, ‘If we don’t do a new album, what are we going to do? What’s the point?’”

“We could probably always play the major festivals,” Siljamäki continues, “but that’s not really as exciting as it is to go out there and play new material.”

So at a 2023 lunch with their manager James Grant, (who’s also Jono’s brother), they decided that It Was Time. Luckily, they had a lot of pre-existing ideas to pull from. Unfortunately they weren’t convinced any of them were very good.

This is where Dresden entered the picture. Half of longstanding dance duo Gabriel & Dresden, he’d long known James Grant and the crew at Anjuna, the family of labels (Anjunbeats, Anjunadeep and Anjunachill) that’s home to a sprawling ecosystem of artists and events, with A&B at the center. (James Grant is also the head of Anjunadeep.) Dresden says he’d previously “planted the seed” with James Grant that he’d be an astute A&R for the label, but he didn’t expect to work with its star act.

“I think they’d been working on the album for a year and weren’t feeling like they’d gotten anywhere,” says Dresden. “They needed outside perspective.”

He was offered the A&R role, but didn’t immediately say yes. Instead, he downloaded the audio book of Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act: A Way of Being, digested its messages about how to get the best from an artist, then spent a day listening to the complete Above & Beyond discography. “I really felt like I understood what they achieve in their records,” he says, “and I felt like I could do it.” He accepted the job.

The trio sent Dresden approximately 40 unfinished songs, and he sorted them into five categories ranging from “‘Sun & Moon’ Level,” (a reference one of their biggest hits) to “I don’t really understand this.” His benchmark for quality was specific: “The framework, he says, “Was that the songs need to be so good that people will be willing to tattoo the lyrics on their bodies.”

Siljamäki, McGuinness and Grant gave Dresden a few weeks to digest the music, then they had their first meeting. “They’d sold me on this idea they were lost,” says Dresden. “In that meeting I said to them, ‘I know you’re not going to believe me, but you already have an album.’”

“That completely changed the vibe,” says Siljamäki. “We had him saying ‘This track you did five years ago, this is really good, did you realize?’ He really helped bring us together.”

“What was great is that there were bits in there that we maybe believed in individually, but maybe the group didn’t believe it,” says Jono Grant. “Having Dave go, ‘This is a great song’ … Whoever didn’t make the track would listen up and go ‘Okay!’ He broke through the egos and the bulls–t and just got down to what’s really good here.”

Through this process, the guys saw that they had roughly two thirds of the album already done. From there, they scheduled weekly virtual meetings where they’d play through the progress of each song and everyone would provide feedback. “It felt a little bit corporate at times, but it was good to have some accountability,” says Jono Grant. “They sort of squeezed an album out of us.”

“We typically resist meetings,” says McGuinness. “We work together sometimes, but it’s very rare for all three of us to be in the room at the same time. That’s never been the way that we work. I work with Jono. Jono works with Paavo, then with me. There are different iterations.”

Amid process, they brought in their longtime collaborators Zoë Johnston, whose ethereal voice is arguably one of the calling cards of the A&B sound, as well as Richard Bedford and Justice Suissa. It’s essentially a given that these guests will be on any new A&B album. “We’re not reinventing the wheel every time we do a record,” says McGuinness. “Having those recognizable voices helps us with radio and helps us to signal that we’re back.”

Eventually, they had 16 tracks, and Bigger Than All of Us was officially completed in May.

The project, James Grant says, “is pretty much the most exciting thing that can happen on Anjunabeats,” with the label putting a third of its global team on the album campaign, from streaming to events to management to merch. In terms of success, he says there’s “no single factor that just changes the game and the campaign. It’s more a cumulative effect of doing lots of things well.”

A huge piece of the puzzle is the upcoming tour, for which A&B will take the same giant stage rig from Coachella to 13 North American amphitheaters from August to October, being one of only a handful of electronic acts able to play this level of venue. (Other acts at this level might include Odesza.) A&B fans are famously dedicated, and among the more welcoming crowds in electronic music, no doubt a trickle-down effect of the group and its focus on wellness, inclusivity and therapeutic crying on the dancefloor.

“I really feel like we have a voice that we need to use in the electronic world,” says Siljamäki, who’s been open about the period of severe burnout and depression he experienced during the pandemic, and how clubbing helped him come back from it. “What we created is so awesome that even if it’s hard, it’s worth going through the hard stuff.”

“The backbone has to be the love of music to keep me engaged,” says Grant, “But the responsibility drags me through the bits when I’m tired on tour and can’t get out of bed in a hotel room.”

This sense of responsibility extends to the core operation itself. “I feel that responsibility every time I go in the office and see how many people we’ve got working there,” says McGuinness. “Without Above & Beyond, Anjunabeats is a very different size company from the one that that we’ve got with us.”

But the size in question here isn’t just the number of Anjuna staff or the number of streams the album will amass or the number of posters sitting here on the table. Above & Beyond’s music is big and anthemic, but it’s also subtle and often understated — opening track “Stepping In” spends its first minute weaving together sounds of wind, bird calls and children playing before really lifting off. “Blood From a Stone,” like so much of the album, is as celestial and contemplative as it is thumping. When Above & Beyond talk about proportions, its never been just about numbers, but the weight of impact their music has on the individual and the global collective that’s its brought together. Ultimately, that’s the size that most matters.

Says McGuinness: “It’s not called Bigger Than All Of Us for no reason.”