Worldpeace DMT share video for ‘Love Yourself’ ahead of co-headline tour with The Femcels.
A genuine underground internet-smash in 2025, with critical acclaim up to eyeballs, Worldpeace DMT – the project powered by London’s Leo Fincham – are making moves for 2026. Announcing a debut headline tour with The Femcels, spanning the UK, EU and US (some of the dates are already sold-out at the time of writing), they share a hyper-active, colour-smash of a music video for ‘Love Yourself’, a highlight from their debut album – ‘The Velvet Underground and Rowan’ – featuring The Femcels’ Rowan Please.
Last summer, we caught up with the Leo over the phone, and after some chat about Ozzy Osbourne’s reality TV career, we delved into a record that sounds like a cross between Animal Collective, Superorganism, and the LittleBigPlanet OST, which is say, like not much else. Below, we publish that interview in full.
How much did working with Rowan Please impact the project?
She definitely informed the style of the album. Our relationship and our sense of humour…her collaboration goes beyond her literal contributions. She’s woven into the record in all its corners.
She clearly brings out a lot of playfulness and colour on the album.
Me and Rowan have a very specific sense of humour. Decisions are based upon what we do or don’t find funny. If something makes both of us laugh, then we go with it. And if it doesn’t, it’s normally not the right thing. It’s not to say the music is comedy…
…but being excited and entertained during the creation process can go a long way.
We definitely used that. We built this universe based on that logic. It works for us and is really enjoyable.
‘The Velvet Underground & Rowan’ is hyperactive, sugary and high energy. It makes sense that you had a lot of fun making it as it definitely comes across.
I got relatively confident with making instrumental music at the beginning of Worldpeace DMT. People liked that stuff and responded well to it. But I really wanted to get into the territory of working with music that was going to perhaps play a bigger role in people’s personal lives; of writing songs which would carry meaning for people, which would be more than just loud and impressive. I used to make much darker music, and I’m glad that people have responded so positively to the lightness of it. I don’t feel like it’s diluted anything, or that anything’s been lost. It’s given people a wider door to get through.
In terms of the meaning it has to me, the synth sounds you use make me think of video game soundtracks from the Game Boy/N64 era. Was that an influence on the music at all?
The line which I told myself through the process of making the album was that I wanted it to be like the 60s filtered through a calculator. That was the reference point. Or like a soundtrack for LittleBigPlanet. I knew I wanted to make music with guitars, ostensibly singer/songwriter music, but I couldn’t find an example of how it had been recorded recently, with a sound that I was at all satisfied with. I don’t really listen to band music, contemporary rock music, or music from London. It’s not really my thing at all. For me, it was a personal crusade to make a record with guitars where the sound was presented in a very particular way, and part of that was reducing it to a miniature version of a band. Everything was recorded by myself in my own room. There’s some good friends that play on it, but it was very much a homespun effort. And I suppose a lot of the synth sounds, the sample brass.. in early video games you had those orchestral sounds, like a mellotron – it’s an impersonation of a classical instrument but it’s synthetic. I wanted this record to be an impersonation of a band. It’s like a fake band. It’s a complete illusion.
You’ve spoken elsewhere about how you’re disillusioned with the UK music scene, especially in London. What don’t you like about it?
I don’t want to be too pointed about it. I don’t want to make it a bigger thing than it has to be. As an artist, you often end up in a situation where you are slightly, irrationally, positioning yourself in opposition to something, really as a tool to work out what it is you want to be. I mean it genuinely when I say that this scene is not something that I’m really involved in or spend time listening to. But beyond that, for whatever reason, it helped me in this process to make a delineation between that and what it was I was doing, more out of security than anything. I feel like using it as a fuel was successful, because I do feel like I made a record that uses guitars and songs, but which is sonically and thematically out on its own.
As a musician I’m divided into a few camps. In one way I’m an engineer, in a second way I’m a songwriter, a third way, I’m a producer/sound designer. And to my engineer (or sound design) brain, a lot of music that I’ve heard, the way in which the sound is presented, it’s almost as if the techniques used to record bands have become too good. It’s not that I want my music to sound retro, but it’s almost as if I’m hearing band recordings, and everything’s three dimensional; it’s too panoramic, and I can hear the studio in the room. I think that more off-kilter music, or sounds presented more like a collage which contains a multitude of different elements interested me more. So the way I built the record was one-piece at a time. Kind of like Tetris or something.
My impression of the UK scene is that it’s highly formalised. It feels like everyone has a record deal. Everyone instantly flocks to the industry and ends up in the same magazines, the same festivals and circumstances. In a way this scene is described as a ‘UK Independent Scene’, but to me it doesn’t seem independent at all. It’s like, if you put the right elements of a band together and you play in south London, you’re just entering a stream. I don’t want to enter that – I don’t want to make too big a deal of it either. I don’t want to make it a catchline that I’m rallying against this thing. It’s not on my mind most of the time.
Worldpeace DMT inside Issue Fifty-Seven of So Young. Sold Out.
There are more ways for music to be heard than just that one pathway. Artists can break through online, through word of mouth. That’s the reason I’m here talking to you!
That’s what I mean. I just wanted to maintain those independent channels. The group of artists that I’m involved with and who are my friends, meeting those people…. Before, I was really out on my own. I made some records, but I didn’t have music friends. I didn’t have any context. But I was lucky enough to meet some people who wanted to make music, but they were coming from a different place. It was really the first place I felt at home as a proper musician. Bassvictim, Charlie Osbourne, Mitsubishi Suicide – these are all friends foremost, but we all work on each other’s music.
What’s next for you?
Me and Rowan have pretty much finished the second album. It’s mapped up and written but it needs to be finished. I want that to happen as soon as possible. We’re on a roll, we have an identity, and we want to push it as far as we can. So yeah, much more music, and shows. I don’t know. We take it a day at a time. We see what people offer us, and we say yes or we say no. We just check our instagram DMs and make decisions based on that. Literally!
The second album is kind of like a ‘part 2’. It’s different for sure, but the idea for the first album…it wasn’t enough for me to leave it at that. I need the second album to flush the ideas out of my system. So yeah, more songs. More dub sirens!
Photo by Thomas Connelly
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