Gold Panda Debuts New Alter-Ego DJ Jenifa, Surprise-Releases Album

Gold Panda Debuts New Alter-Ego DJ Jenifa, Surprise-Releases Album

For about a decade now, Derwin Dicker, the British producer better known to most of us as Gold Panda, has been releasing hazy, thoughtful, wandering instrumental electronic music. He’s good at it, too. It’s been a while since we last heard from him; he released the album Good Luck And Do Your Best and the follow-up EP Kingdom back in 2016. But now Gold Panda has returned in a completely new form.

Today, Dicker surprise-released a new album under a whole new alias. Under the name DJ Jenifa, Dicker has a whole new album called Jag Trax. It doesn’t sound much like Gold Panda. Instead, Dicker has made a harder, more physical dance album, one built on loops. Inspired by rap and house, and by clowning the idea of shitty upwardly-mobile club culture, Dicker has put together an album of tracks he made just for fun. First-listen verdict: Pretty good!

In a press release, Dicker says:

When I did the last record in 2015, I made a track for a laugh. I make lots of tracks just for me, I suppose. I made a track about Chelmsford, where I was living at the time. It was about going out there in a white shirt, blue jeans, brown shoes, which is like a dress code you need to get into clubs cuz you can’t go in with a hoodie. I say “clubs” I mean like, an O’Neils or some kind of Wetherspoons-style nightspot which is open till 3am. Those kind of places that exist in suburbia.

So I made a tune called “Dresscode.” It appeared at the end of the “In My Car” video [from Good Luck And Do Your Best] and then I realized I had loads of these tunes just lying around and put them together.

You can stream the new album below.

You can get Jag Trax at Bandcamp.

more from New Music