London trio Domina make minimal synth music that marries awkward, romantic charm with an intimate, stripped-back and proudly rough-around-the-edges sound. Their electro-pop is at once grounded and stylistic, meticulously crafted but, above all, human. On a Zoom call with Liv, Anders and Jude, we spoke about everything from recording their debut album to favourite films and their ambitions for 2026.
Your debut EP has been out for about a month now. How have you found the reaction so far, how does it feel to finally have it out there?
Liv: The release was really successful, we had quite a lot of people giving it good reactions and coming down to shows. We’ve had Radio 6 play as well and we did a DJ set at NTS as a result of the EP so we’ve had a couple of cool promo-y opportunities. It’s also just kicked us to start making new things and given us a bit of direction.
Anders: This year has been mental, it’s been really crazy. We recorded the EP almost a year to the day that it came out, and we had no idea that anyone was going to listen to it or anything, so getting asked if we’d like to go on NTS was quite surprising.
What do you hope people feel when they listen to the EP?
Jude: Enjoyment? It’s the first thing we’ve done, really, so I think it’s quite childlike and it’s also a bit of an experiment – we’ve settled on an organ, a synth, and an electric bass so it was kind of an experiment just to try and write some songs for those instruments.
Anders: And we recorded it all ourselves in this house, in the garage, so it definitely feels like early us. The other stuff that we’re making now feels a bit more evolved, so listening back to the EP is like, oh, wow, we were trying to do that.
I read that Anders keeps a notes page of phrases heard in conversations – what draws you to collecting those and how do you think it impacts the sound of the EP?
Anders: Yeah I do, it’s pretty random. Sometimes I find it difficult to just sit and write lyrics, so it’s quite nice to collect phrases that sound nice together. Over time, I’ve collected words and things that I think are nice, and when I listened to the songs as they came out, I remember when I overheard that sentence, so the songs feels full of memories.
There’s a physical, almost old-school quality to Domina in the way you improvise live and capture the sound of the rooms when you record. What do you feel that approach gives you that a more polished, more digitally driven process couldn’t?
Liv: I think the memory aspect Anders mentioned gives it a sentimental feel that feels like something very homely and relatable. I think lots of people pick up on the emotional aspects of each song and the atmosphere that’s created with that. It’s less about the content and more about the ambience.
There’s a lot of ambiguity and in-betweenness in your music. What draws you to sounds that don’t have clearer edges?
Anders: I think a lot of music can sound a bit too clean, a bit unnatural. But there wasn’t really any intention behind going for noisier sounds instead of cleaner ones. We just recorded it in a way we were happy with – it’s not like we thought, ‘oh, let’s purposely make it sound shit’.
Liv: When we’re playing together, if someone does something that’s a bit jagged around the edges, I don’t know, I just like that. And we like that as kind of a lead element and then we build something around it. So it often comes in as a texture.
Are there any artists who inspire that jagged approach?
Jude: I’m a big fan of Noir Boy George, he’s a French minimal synth kind of guy, and I’ve always loved his stuff. It’s just basically him with a synth and a sequencer and a drum machine, and all of his recordings are just him playing live. He just sticks a mic up and records out his amplifier, and it just sounds super real. I love that kind of thing.
Liv: We all listen to quite vintage music as well, we all listen to stuff that was pre-digital so I think that’s maybe that’s something we unintentionally try and replicate the sound of.
I read that Jude and Anders have been playing music together for a long time, how do you think that long-standing connection shapes Domina?
Jude: Yeah, we’ve been playing now for, wow, it feels like many lifetimes. Sometimes working with session musicians gets a bit, you know, lonely. It takes a while to understand how people work as well and I’ve been in other projects where you’re working with people who don’t really know each other – it always gets to a point where some clash happens because they found something about the other person, but I feel like we have already kind of found out everything about each other.
Domina has a strong visual identity and Jude you’re a filmmaker – how essential is the visual world to who you are as a band?
Jude: Yeah that’s definitely my background and I suppose I wanted to use my degree somehow, so, you know, make videos. The visual side, I mean, yeah, of course.
We’re trying to make hazy, dreamy sort of innocent soundscapes, and visuals is a whole side of that. I feel like the music video is such a good chance to experiment with all sorts of stuff, it’s a great outlet.
My background is also all analog stuff and old TV equipment and film cameras, and that’s similar to the way we record so I think it’s a great opportunity to mesh the two together and create an image for what the sound is, really. Which adds to the ambience and the world-building.
Are there any particular films or directors you take inspiration from?
Jude: I love Buster Keaton. King Kong is a good film, I’ve got King Kong on Super 8, and if you want to come over and watch it, like, anytime, you’re welcome.
And that short film Neighbours. Two guys are in a film together, and there’s this single flower between them. At first they’re friendly, they get on – and then the flower appears and suddenly they’re fighting over who gets to have it on their lap. They end up beating each other to death. That was a huge influence.
It’s by Norman McLaren, and the soundtrack was made by taking a strip of film with an optical track – basically waveforms – and drawing little dots directly onto the part where the soundtrack sits. It creates this really strange electronic noise, completely experimental, and you don’t know what it’ll sound like until you run it through the projector. It’s a similar thing for us: experimenting with sound and visuals so you never quite know what you’re going to get.
I read you’re already working on the second EP, how is that taking shape and how does it differ to the first one?
Jude: Second album! We’re doing an album next. We’ve got a lot of songs we’ve written and got built up, so we just thought let’s just do it.
Anders: But I think it’s going to be more of a mix tape than an album album, we haven’t designed it to be like a single concept. The EP was a bit more concise, whereas this is going to be just a bit more compilation-y, it’s going to be a bit of everything that we’ve made.
Liv: We’re still very much developing our sound, so we’ve got loads of songs that we really like but a lot of them are quite different. It’s because we all write songs individually, we’ve got like four songs each and all of our influences are so different so our songs do sound quite different, but they work really nicely in an album.
Were there any lessons you learnt from making the EP that you’re going to take into the album?
Liv: I think we know what works live now, because some of the stuff we recorded a year ago hasn’t worked that well live so we’re taking that into account because we want to be able to perform all of it.
Jude: We get a bit stressed about small things, we get very particular, which is good, but we’re trying to get a bit less particular. I don’t know if I should be having this conversation publicly but if we get too good at instruments, then that’s surely going to mess our whole set up. Because the whole thing is not knowing how to play, all the instruments we play are not our first instruments. We’ve all gone from being in guitar music to whatever this is.
What would you like Domina to achieve in 2026?
Anders: I want to get this mixtape finished, hopefully, by the start of the year. And that will set us up well to hopefully do some festivals and do some more DIY shows as well. We played in the Young Space and I want to do more of that kind of thing where we’re just set up in some random room. In some interesting spaces to light it weirdly and do stuff like that.
Words: Donovan Livesey
