Have you seen a movie sometime in the last 10 years? Of course you have, and you’ve likely heard some of Tom Holkenborg’s work.
As one of Hollywood’s most in-demand composers, the Dutch producer has scored and soundtracked hit after hit, including Zack Snyder’s Justice League, Mad Max: Fury Road, Deadpool and Godzilla vs Kong.
Still, way before he was turning heads and sending shivers up spines in theaters around the world, he was getting bodies grooving as DJ-producer Junkie XL. Now, after a nearly decade-spanning break, Junkie XL is back with a deep and pounding set of techno tracks that brings cinematic sense to the warehouse rave.
A Fluff Scam, as the EP is titled, is out Friday (Dec. 10) on Sasha’s LNOE label. It’s a dark and pulsing four-track collection that was inspired by Holkenborg’s work on the 2020 Netflix mystery series White Lines. The show takes place on the party island of Ibiza. Naturally, scoring the seedy underbelly of clubs got the Junkie XL juices flowing.
“These tracks were something fun and personal for me, a chance to stretch my dance-floor muscles again, after recalling so many of my Ibiza memories during White Lines,” Holkenborg says. “They are quite different from the classic Junkie XL sound, and I never had any intention of releasing them, but when Sasha asked me too, I couldn’t say no.”
True, Junkie XL’s previous work has all been pretty funky, in the electronica and big beat lane of the mid and late 2000s. From 1995 to 2014, he released six albums, and collaborated with luminaries Gary Numan, Chuck D and Madonna, among others.
A Fluff Scam stands strongly in the techno bunker that does show hints of Holkenborg’s compositional growth in the meantime. Give it a spin, and give some thanks to Sasha.
