Music

The shimmering high point of Crazy P’s 2024 album Any Signs of Love is a song called “Human After All.” It’s a showcase for lead singer Danielle Moore, who erects small towers of harmonies, repeatedly layering her burnished, breathy voice over a motoring beat. While the bottom of the track is pure, high-octane propulsion, the top is fluffy and lavish, like a racecar covered in frosting.
“She loved looping herself up, and she loved the idea of creating something dynamic from lines which are just looping over and over,” says Jim Baron, one of Crazy P’s co-founders. They had tried the effect years before, on 2011’s “Wecanonlybewhoweare,” but wanted to take another crack at it. “You get all these counterpoints from all these different lines working together, tracked up, to give a really smooth sort of feel,” Baron continues. “She loved that.”

Moore had been Crazy P’s singer for more than two decades. She died at age 52 in August, roughly three months before “Human After All” came out on Any Signs of Love. (In January, her family said the cause of death was suicide.) “Danielle is irreplaceable,” Baron says solemnly — she was not only a cool-but-stirring presence on club-ready gems like “Give It Up” and “Cruel Mistress” and “Clouds,” but a dynamic performer who scaled the DJ booth to dance and sing as co-founder Chris Todd played behind her at a 2023 show in Brooklyn. 

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Crazy P started roughly 30 years ago when Baron and Todd were introduced by mutual friends at the University of Nottingham. The two shared a multi-instrumentalist background — over the years, they’ve got credits for playing bass, guitar, keyboards, and more — and a taste for house music.

When they met, it was an energizing time in the U.K. for house heads. “We’d had a lot of brilliant American releases, but there was no real U.K. scene in the early 1990s,” Baron says. “It wasn’t until the mid-1990s that we got our act together.” Both men gravitated towards labels like Paper Recordings — who would later release their first two albums, when they went by Crazy Penis — and Nuphonic, companies which specialized in a sound Baron describes as “still underground, but with more of a more disco-y tinge.”

The pair wanted their music to sound like it was played live. There was just one problem: They didn’t have the equipment to make that happen. Luckily, thanks to technological advances, “sampling had become a bit more affordable,” Todd says. So they “pilfered some record shops” — a much cheaper endeavor in the 1990s than it is today — to find material to slice and dice, creating the building blocks for their productions. 

Their debut album, 1999’s A Nice Hot Bath With, was appealingly loose, if a little meandering. But determining what the live Crazy P experience would look like proved challenging. “We had done a couple of tentative gigs where it was me and Jim basically taking our studio out to the club,” Todd explains. “We did about two of those and realized that’s not really the way forward.”

Around this time, Todd and Baron met Moore going out in Manchester. “We would end up going back to her house for the after party,” Todd remembers. “She was a personality and a talent — she would sing often.”

They subsequently decided to invite Moore to join the group as a vocalist, along with another on-and-off collaborator, Tim Davies, on bass and Matt Klose, a friend from college, on drums. “We effectively wanted to be like a disco band,” Baron says. “And you’re never going to successfully do that with two blokes.”

The Wicked Is Music was their first album to feature contributions from all the newcomers, and also the first where the group cracked the code on dancefloor heaters. Opener “There’s a Better Place” pairs a frisky bass line with an excerpt from Gene Wilder’s Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory song “Pure Imagination,” adding a fantastical edge to the driving beat. Better still: “You Are We,” a house cut, crisp and sweet as a candied apple, which pulls its vocals from “Until,” the heartwrenching final track from the Bee Gees’ 1979 album Spirits Having Flown.

Adding Moore and co. gave Crazy P a new way to write songs, and a different arsenal of sounds to draw from. Some of the group’s most enduring tracks remained sample-based house: “Like a Fool” (2015), with its commanding beat and rueful vocal, could have appeared on The Wicked Is Music right after “You Are We.” 

“Night Rain” (2019) on the other hand, requires live-band textures to summon the spirit of late 1970s Los Angeles studio pop, seamless and casually virtuosic. And “Heartbreaker” (2011) exists somewhere between those poles: The vocals are samples of two dynamite singers, Aretha Franklin and James Brown, but the bass line sounds like something from a stadium rock show. (Baron, who played the riff, hears New Order.)

“The samples were still a part” of Crazy P’s sound, Baron acknowledges, “but we had the means to record everything that we wanted to.” “We started getting together and jamming in the studio,” Todd adds. 

This proved an early test for Moore — one that she passed with flying colors. “It’s so difficult to set up in a room as a singer and jam [with a band],” Baron notes. But Moore “had a real talent for it. We’ve had a few of those four-hour, five-hour sessions where you come out and the song is kind of done. I haven’t worked with many singers who can do that. She was always quick off the mark with melody and lyrics.” 

When Crazy P started work on Any Signs of Love, Moore wanted to incorporate “some tougher, edgier stuff,” as Baron puts it. “You want every record to develop from the last one,” he adds. “And she made a comment akin to, ‘Let’s stick it up ’em.’” 

As a result, the synthesizers are noticeably chillier. The title track sounds like it was blessed by Giorgio Moroder in 1978, while “The Revolution Will Not Be Anything” incorporates some of the spidery textures of early Chicago house. The biting electronics come through all the more clearly because Crazy P pared back their production style. “Me and Toddy are famous for throwing the kitchen sink in there,” Baron says. “This record doesn’t sound like that. There’s loads of space in it.”

Any Signs of Love came out at the end of November. Todd and Baron are happy to share fond memories of working with Moore, but reticent when it comes to discussing her tragic death, and somber when asked about the group’s future without its longtime public face. (In addition to fronting Crazy P onstage, Moore often took the lead in interviews as well.) Releasing an album provides “a little bit of breathing space to work out what we’re going to do,” Todd says. “There’s no plan.” 

He’s played a few DJ gigs back to back with Baron, including one seven-hour long set in Liverpool; “it’s been good to have something to focus on.” And the band has several festival gigs booked this summer, including Gottwood and Wild Wood in the U.K. and Love International in Croatia.

Whatever Crazy P becomes moving forward, Baron adds, “it will be different.”

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