RA Podcast

The masked duo go on the record to address criticisms, identity and their forthcoming album, Infinite Now.

Anonymous DJ-and-producer duo Two Shell are both loved and reviled. They've spent the last few years making the question of their identity inseparable from their music, earning an enormous fanbase with their original, up-tempo productions, and then alienating much of it through relentless pranks. Some of their most illustrious capers have included selling albums embedded in rocks, sending decoys to give fake interviews and booking stand-ins to perform in their place at major gigs and festivals.

But after their headline set on Glastonbury's IICON stage last summer—a proper, career-spanning 90 minutes that they actually turned up for—fans flooded their inbox with the same comment: "we know it wasn't you up there! classic!!" Their response was an Instagram post that broke the script. "Anonymity sometimes feels like a mistake," they wrote. And now, on the eve of a new album called Infinite Now, they've agreed to sit down for their first-ever video interview.

In this RA Exchange, Two Shell directly address the criticisms that have been levelled against them over the years; discuss what they owe their fans; and unpack their creative process, embrace of AI and more. Listen to the episode in full.

A lesson in universal love, told via deep club grooves.

When future heads look back at New York nightlife from the mid-2010s onwards, the name Love Injection will stand out.

As historians, stewards and disciples of underground dance music, Barbie Bertisch and Paul Raffaele live and breathe the culture's inclusive, anti-commercial and anti-egotistical ideals. Underlining their myriad pursuits–DJing, promoting, publishing, curation, the list goes on–are ironclad principles destined to cement their legacy.

On RA.1044, the duo keep it real. Recorded spontaneously, it shows off their core palette: timeless Detroit house courtesy of Scott Grooves, leftfield 303 squelches from Magic Mountain High, the classic dub techno of Rhythm & Sound and plenty more besides. It's a living history of Love Injection, delivered with their signature level of passion and care.

Find the tracklist and Q&A at ra.co/podcast/1063

The Drain Gang cofounder talks about mysticism, Gen Z and his new album, Sulfur Surfer.

Bladee's work as a founding member of the Swedish collective Drain Gang has shaped a new generation of underground music. The group's sound, which is rooted in cloud rap and Auto-Tune experimentation, and pulls from trance, noise, metal, goth and grunge, has earned them an enormous following of fans—AKA "drainers"—overwhelmingly under 30.

Bladee has long been one of Drain Gang's most prominent voices, building a prolific solo career alongside the collective's output. His work engages with mysticism through vulnerable, diaristic lyrics about his state of mind. On his new album, Sulfur Surfer, he presents an autobiographical figure caught between "letting go and holding on"—a continuation of his longstanding interest in spirituality and the occult. He draws on the story of St. George, the Swedish painter Hilma af Klint and the occultism of British group Current 93, whose frontman David Tibet makes a guest appearance.

In this RA Exchange, Bladee talks about making honest music, the role Drain Gang has played in pushing him to find his voice, his ambivalence about fame and his collaboration with Skrillex. Sulfur Surfer is out now on Trash Island. Listen to the episode in full.

90 minutes of wistful house from a talented Steel City Dance Discs affiliate—perfect for easing into the night or winding down after the party.

Since Resident Advisor dubbed Pretty Girl "a star in the making" in 2023, the Melbourne DJ has played Coachella, gone viral on Boiler Room, and remixed Romy and Fred Again.. But she’s taken stardom on her own terms. Instead of stadium-ready adrenaline, her sound is a balanced cocktail of UK garage, sugary vocals, and '90s electronica whimsy, finding the sweet spot between the charts and the club.

Her RA Mix perfectly captures this depth of emotion. The lush, unhurried session moves nimbly through Donato Dozzy, Tin Man, and unreleased Pretty Girl goodies. Full of overcast chords and melancholy arpeggios, it’s an exquisite journey that will sound just as good in the club as it will in the taxi home.

Find the tracklist and Q&A at ra.co/podcast/1062

The queer icon and punk provocateur talks bodily autonomy, embracing ageing and her new album, No Lube So Rude.

Merrill Nisker—known to most of the world as Peaches—has spent 25 years making music that refuses to behave. Since her 2000 breakthrough, The Teaches of Peaches, she's built a body of work at the intersection of performance art, punk provocation and dance music, becoming an international queer icon and a touchstone for anyone told their body or identity doesn't fit.

Peaches' new album, No Lube So Rude, is out now on the Washington-based label Kill Rock Stars, also home to the likes of Bikini Kill and Sleater-Kinney. The title is a meditation on the friction and hostility that define this moment, and a frank reckoning with menopause, bodily autonomy and the systemic erasure of women who refuse to disappear quietly into middle age.

In this RA Exchange, Peaches, now 59, talks about making the record after a decade of silence and what it means to keep making confrontational art. Listen to the episode in full.

Seven hours of camp, chug and genre-hopping hedonism from techno's two princes of darkness, recorded live at Kyiv's ∄.

Hear the names Hayden Payne, aka Phase Fatale, and Pablo Bozzi, and it might conjure visions of dark techno. As Berghain and KHIDI residents, both artists are synonymous with the heavier strands of misfit dance music.

But Soft Crash, their lockdown-born joint venture, offers something different: making the world's darkest dance floors fun again. RA.1042 is a crash course through the campier ends of the spectrum, pulling from Italo, disco, and house for a mix full of vocals, ascending chords, and bouncy arpeggios.

Clocking in at a gargantuan seven-hour runtime, the mix perfectly balances both of their styles without the energy ever dipping. Swinging for the fences with chuggy, oddball bangers and trance euphoria, the duo weaves tracks from Steffi and Virginia, Goldfrapp, and Junior Jack, alongside climactic Easter eggs from Moby, Madonna, and Underworld. It's the sound of a party you never want to end.

Read the Q&A at ra.co/podcast/1061

The Dutch photographer and art director on his longtime collaboration with Depeche Mode, moving into feature films and 50 years of documenting music culture.

In 1979, the 24-year-old Dutch photographer Anton Corbijn talked his way into a Joy Division shoot in a London Underground tunnel by citing a magazine assignment he didn't have. The band posed with their backs to the camera, and subsequently, no magazine accepted the photo. Within a year, Ian Curtis was dead, and the picture became one of the defining images of post-punk.

Corbijn has since become one of the world's best known music photographers, capturing artists like Tom Waits, Nick Cave, Bowie, Captain Beefheart and nearly every major name to enter the pop realm. In this RA Exchange, he reflected on a life spent documenting music culture and his new retrospective at Fotografiska, Corbijn, Anton, which spans five decades of his work.

He also spoke in depth about his longtime relationship with Depeche Mode. As the band's creative director, he has worked on all of their music videos, stage design, album covers and more for over 40 years. Corbijn's retrospective will be on display until September 20th, 2026, and his new feature length film, Switzerland, will land in theatres this year. Listen to the episode in full.

Entirely unreleased, undeniably funky techno.

Charles Accarisi, AKA Chlär, treats techno like a science. From his earliest days as an audio engineer, the Lisbon-via-Switzerland artist has approached techno with the precision of a seasoned experimentalist, dissecting our love of listening to kick drums in dark, sweaty clubs down to its very bones.

Before launching his label, Primal Instinct, in 2023, he dug deep, building its foundation on neuroscience studies exploring syncopation and bass frequencies. Yet, for all its academic rigor, Accarisi's music remains incredibly funky.

You can hear this endless pursuit of groove in his DJ sets. His productions flit across the techno continuum with similar versatility. One minute, as half of Funk Assault, he's flipping a Beastie Boys vocal into a 140-BPM weapon; the next, he aims straight for the head, trading peak-time bacchanalia for the haunted hypnotism of the afterhours.

RA 1041 is all of this and more. Composed entirely of unreleased tracks, it delivers 70 minutes of heads-down techno in its purest form. It's heavy and dark, for sure, but undeniably swung, seamlessly bridging dub techno and sweat-inducing hardgroove throwbacks. This is contemporary techno synthesized by a master chemist.

Read the Q&A at ra.co/podcast/1060

@chlaer

@primalinstinctrecords

The jungle DJ and trumpeter talks about late-career popularity, jazz in Japan and what it means to build a life in music.

You probably know Takuya Nakamura first and foremost as a viral sensation. The Tokyo-born, New York-based trumpeter has achieved minor internet fame in recent years for playing live trumpet over jungle records on The Lot Radio. But Nakamura was composing and performing for more than 30 years before becoming one of the most talked-about acts of the contemporary Jungle revival.

In this RA Exchange, Nakamura dives into his musical journey: growing up in Tokyo, the Japanese jazz scene, and studying at the New England Conservatory of Music under the great composer and theorist George Russell. He also reflects on how jungle has evolved, why he loves performing in the UK, and how a new generation is breathing life into jazz. Listen to the episode in full.

The São Paulo-based artist tears through baile funk, ballroom, Latin club and techno in a turbo-charged showcase of global club music's cutting edge.

Take one look at Clementaum behind the decks and she seems less like a DJ than a force of nature. Dressed to the nines and usually keeping time with a fan, she mixes impossibly chaotic drum patterns that ricochet from baile funk to ballroom, Baltimore club to kuduro. Her sets are packed with her own productions—deliciously chaotic collisions of two decades of Latin American club music, shaken hard with EDM and techno.

Raised in Curitiba, Clementaum entered nightlife as a hostess before stepping behind the decks and beginning to produce in 2018. A Rinse FM residency followed in 2023, her first European tour in 2024 and now, fresh off her debut Oceania run, she has her sights set on the rest of the globe.

RA.1040 is a turbo-charged introduction to Clementaum's sonic world. Loaded with unreleased tracks from herself as well as other rising figures in the Brazilian underground, it captures the bleeding edge of global club music: ecstatic horn lines, flubber-bounce kick drums, freewheeling vocal samples, stadium-sized breakdowns, video game arpeggios and basslines that seem to rearrange space-time itself. It's possible you haven't heard a Clementaum set before, but it's impossible to forget one when you have.

Find the tracklist and Q&A at ra.co/podcast/1059

@clementaum