If you're an indie music fan who happens to enjoy shaking your skinny jeans-clad booty, then odds are you worship at the Church of DFA Records—an independent dance-punk music label founded by LCD Soundsytem's James Murphy and Tim Goldsworthy of U.N.K.L.E. These two Brooklyn boys are responsible for distributing some of the most interesting (and buzzed about) sounds going on in music right now.

Like their most recent release, the self-titled debut from DFA group Hercules And Love Affair, an album that Pitchfork has dubbed one of 2008's best and NME is calling it the party album of the year. Colorado native Andrew Butler, the main man behind this dance floor foursome, got his start as a teenager spinning house tracks in gay clubs, feeling marginalized by mainstream culture because of his sexuality and fondness for all things disco: "Listening to disco samples being played over house beats and dancing with a bunch of kids felt liberating; it made feel me I belonged."

A move to New York to attend college at Sarah Lawrence allowed Butler to find escape in the booming nightclub scene and start experimenting with his own sound. "During breaks between classes I would investigate this curious shop in SoHo which had the weirdest music playing inside, like Telex songs played on the wrong speed and disco version of Mozart," he remembers.

And now, almost a decade later, he's joined forces with a team of vocalists—Antony Hegarty of Antony of the Johnsons, longtime friend and jewelry designer Kim Ann Foxman and CocoRosie collaborator Nomi—to remind us that before it became cheesy, disco was considered pretty punk rock. With a record that is at turns joyful and melancholy, but always danceable and a dash rebellious, he's reinventing a genre that most of us weren't around to see the first time around, and making it feel incredibly relevant in the process.

Hercules And Love Affair play Mezzanine on July 26th; click here to grab your tickets!

- Caroline Stanley

Similar Topics:clubs, dance, DFA, indie

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