FR 115: Anthony Naples Goes Back to the Drawing Board

The New York producer discusses the creative reboot behind his new album—and the record he had to delete in order to make it

Anthony Naples’ new album, Scanners, marks a subtle but important stylistic shift: Where the New York producer’s last two albums have largely avoided the dancefloor in favor of zoned-out strains of downtempo, Scanners represents some of the most club-centric house and techno he’s produced in years—but with a twist.

When I first heard the album, my immediate impression was that it seemed to hark back to key sounds from the minimal house and techno of the late ’90s and early 2000s. I’ve been noticing a return to classic minimal aesthetics in various places over the past couple of years—Huerco S.’s spellbinding album as Loidis, Wisdom Teeth’s excellent Pattern Gardening compilation—and Scanners feels like part of this rising wave. But rather than any particular retro hallmark, what stands out most is its subtlety. In many ways, it’s a big, beefy record; the kick drums alone are huge, and the basslines pack a serious wallop. But these tracks don’t get by on brute force alone—there’s a wealth of detail lurking in the background, making for some of the most dynamic dance music I’ve heard in ages.

There’s another important twist to the story, too. When I spoke to Naples in late April, he was quick to explain that Scanners’ genesis was entirely accidental. He only created it after scrapping another record that he had completed and ready to go. The new album’s subtlety is a direct counterreaction to what he came to view as its predecessor’s big-room excess.

Whether or not the previous record really was all that over the top, the rest of us will never know: He canceled the record, which had been slated for release on another label, paid back the mastering costs, and deleted it from his hard drive. A few of those tracks have been floating around in his friends’ DJ sets for a couple of years, but their identities are now forever doomed to the dustbin of track-ID history.

It might seem like an impulsive or capricious move, but I think the story speaks to his integrity: Struck with sudden self-doubt, Naples decided he’d rather take the loss than put out something that might someday feel like a betrayal of his values. “It might have been my biggest track,” he said of one of the deleted cuts. “But I’ll never know, because I don’t even have it anymore. But I think it’s better that way. This all means too much to me to put out something that I can’t stand by.”

Naples’ revelation about the never-to-be-heard record drives home the fact that his albums aren’t just collections of tracks; they’re snapshots of periods in his evolution, moving parts of a dynamic creative process in which every decision affects the next. Scanners isn’t even the final outcome of this particular chain reaction: Another new album, created in conjunction with it, is due out at some point this year, taking some of the same methods and ideas and pointing them toward mellower, more interior ends.

Read on for the full interview. In the course of our 90-minute conversation, we talked about everything from Naples’ new job doing A&R at XL to the joy of running ultramarathons to the reasons that he stepped back from DJing for an extended period, because he felt like his career was headed in the wrong direction. Whenever he finds himself getting jaded, he told me, “I’ll always be like, OK, I need to go away again, because that’s how I keep going without getting too angry at the state of things. I find myself playing gigs and there’s a bottle service-y thing, and I remember the reason I’m doing it. I’m like, this is the wrong place. I have to stop again and course-correct.”

Our conversation been lightly edited for clarity, but it’s still epic—it might be the longest interview I’ve run on Futurism Restated yet. The first third is free to read for all, while the full thing is exclusively for paying subscribers, in gratitude for their support. It’s worth reading in its entirety, too, because the anecdote of exactly how and why he came to change his mind about the since-scrapped EP—in a spontaneous moment of mortification—may surprise even some people in his innermost circle.

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I love your new album. It came as quite a surprise when I first put it on, especially after the last two albums, which were much more in a sort of downtempo zone. It’s your first dance full-length in quite a few years—I guess since Fog FM.

I wasn’t necessarily thinking of a thread between the last two, and then this one being a shift. In the last few years, I’ve taken a lot of pressure off myself to think that it has to be linear, like people are following this journey and expecting some sort of logical next step. I’ve been discovering a lot of older music in a nonlinear way—I don’t check out the first record, the second record, the third record, you know. A very different example from my own music is someone like Bill Callahan. I only discovered him a few years ago and I jump around, but there’s 20 albums to go through, and I can appreciate things that have happened with his career over time, where he’s gotten more and more like himself, sort of. But I can also listen to them out of order, and it still paints a good picture of who he is as an artist.

Initially, I started doing this record as an EP. It was about to come out on another label, by friends of mine that I love and respect. But basically, the tracks were aimed for big-room effectiveness, with snare rolls and stuff, and it was about to come out—it was mastered and pressed and everything and on the way—and I just was like, wait a minute, what am I doing? That’s not who I want to be. I understand the effectiveness of that kind of stuff, and why that would be beneficial to do, but as an artistic statement—not even for other people’s perception, just in my heart of hearts—I was like, this is the wrong thing to do.

It wasn’t like anyone was egging me on to do a bigger record. I was just trying to do something for effectiveness. I think I do this between records—I make a bunch of music, and I often get very far along, and then go, wait, no. The intention in this is not honest, or it’s not up to my standard or whatever. And I end up completely starting over again. That’s what happened with the first song on Scanners: I basically just scrapped everything, canceled the record, paid back what they had invested, and then that same day started and finished the first song on the record. Which, you know, it’s not a very hard song to make. It’s very simple. It’s like five tracks or something like that. But then I was like, Oh, yeah, this is actually what I want to make—something like this. This is what I listen to. I like the simplicity of this kind of music and I don’t like the aggressiveness of snare rolls and stuff. And I was like, Oh.

Sorry, I’m going on a tangent here. But simultaneously, I’ve taken the last six months off from DJing, basically from December of last year until next Saturday, when I play my first gig in Philly. Because I was like, What am I playing? I was in Japan and I played at this great club called VENT. They booked these really thoughtful people to play around me, probably because of sets of mine they heard online. And then I was playing this very different style of music. It’s not that I don’t like this music, but I was just kind of going through the motions, which I think happens to people when they’re touring a lot. They’re just kind of going from gig to gig.

I work at XL now, the label. So having that job and then making my own music and playing on top of it, it was a lot to try to keep on top of. Especially because the DJ world moves really fast at the moment. So I just felt like I needed to get out of the ring, so to speak. It was good, because it made me really think about what I enjoy and what I like in music, especially dance music. I started going out and I saw a few really good DJs, and I realized, you don’t have to go this way just because it seems like that’s where people’s attention is headed.

It seems silly, because I’ve been doing this long enough to know that. But I think I can be honest enough to admit that there’s this survival instinct that kicks in when you’re trying to make music in the public eye. So when I caught myself thinking that way, I was just having a very honest conversation with myself. I was like, I gotta take a break from this, because it means more to me than to make it into this thing where I’m compromising my own taste or something, you know? So that’s what led to me starting this record.

There are like five different things I want to respond to there, but it’s interesting to hear about your crisis of confidence in your playing. DJing has never been more than a hobby for me, and it’s rarer and rarer that I actually do it, but I’ve always felt like I’m pulled in so many directions, simply for professional reasons, because I write about so much different stuff. I’m interested in experimental music and ambient and techno and deep house, all kinds of different styles. And when I get in the DJ booth, it’s like, what do I choose? Because it’s all interesting to me, but not everybody wants to hear all of that. It’s hard to focus. So it’s interesting to me that someone who’s actually doing this for a living would struggle with some of the same things that an amateur does.

Yeah, but I mean, I’m definitely an amateur. I don’t do it for a living. I actually feel really grateful now to not have it be the primary focus. I think I felt this [anxiety] more when DJing was more the primary focus, in the sense that everything sank or swam based on me making sure the gig was good, because then it leads to the next gig, and so on. It’s serious pressure, especially because there’s so many amazing DJs out there. It’s a highly competitive thing. With not as many clubs, it’s harder to get gigs. There’s a lot of pressure for anybody doing it, a lot of pressure to move quickly with what’s going on. In the time since I put out Orbs, I feel like music has moved a million miles per hour in terms of what gets played in clubs, what people are interested in, how they digest all sorts of stuff. I needed to step back from all of this to honestly reassess what I’m even interested in.

There’s a time and place for everything, and I love big, effective tracks and everything like that too. But I care about subtlety in music as much as I care about the largeness of it, and I found that that was kind of lacking in my own music at the time. And I was like, Whoa, hang on, what are you going to think about in 10 years when you hear this? It’s not going to be something you’re proud of. So then thinking about well, what makes you proud—this is going to make me proud, sticking to my own interests, not thinking about gigs or anything, just thinking about what you’re putting out into the world. You’re making music in your bedroom or wherever, you do it for yourself. At least I do. But I also do it knowing that people are going to hear it. And you want to relate to people and you want them to understand you, in a way. And I think it’s the same with DJing—you don’t want to just be doing things for other people. You want to show them who you are and hope that for the most part it goes over well. When I think of my favorite DJs, someone like Villalobos, I don’t think he cares at all about what people think—he’s just like, this is what I do and if you don’t like it, whatever. But it’s obviously worked for him. It’s become his thing, that he does what he wants to. And I think that that’s really cool.

Your last two records, Orbs and Chameleon, were much mellower—more downtempo, more textural, not floor-focused at all—and maybe it’s easier to show people what you’re about on a record like that, because there’s not an expectation around the effectiveness of the music. Whereas with dance music, there’s a social compact—it’s got to move people. It’s gotta make you bounce. So maybe it’s easy to fall back on the snare-roll thing. But if you want to show people who you really are, with a greater degree of subtlety, maybe that’s trickier terrain if you’re also thinking about club functionality.

Yeah, definitely. I guess that’s why it’s easier to put this music into the context of an album and not an EP. Because with EPs, you’re really saying that this is for DJs to play. Whereas with dance music to listen to, with albums, I think anything can fit into the context of an album. Obviously, I love to write them, since I’ve probably done more of those in the last five years than EPs. But what I’m looking for in an album is a sense of completeness, a complete thought. Within the context of that, you can be more artful, especially making dance music—it doesn’t have to be so effective, it can just be, you know. The template is there to do whatever you want over the 4/4. One song on the new album is not in 4/4, but for the most part the whole record is in 4/4, and I really love that, because it gives you the guidelines of what to work on. I guess it’s easier for me to write this kind of music in the mindset of an album, because maybe people are more open-minded to listen through the parts that are more minimal and more simplistic than if it was the A1 of a 12-inch.

You talk about Scanners being a reaction to this more muscular club record that you decided not to do. But it’s still quite a big record, in a way. The bass is quite boomy, quite muscular. At least on my speakers, it really fills the room. But it’s also got real subtlety. There are a ton of almost inaudible sounds in the background that I’m only finally beginning to clock. There are these nearly inaudible shimmery textures. It’s a very dynamic record—like, it hasn’t been brick-wall compressed, right? There’s a lot of detail in there.

Yeah. I remember reading an interview with DJ Sprinkles years and years ago, and they said, I don’t put any compression on records. And I was like, Oh, okay, those records sound amazing. So I won’t do that either. I’ve always left the mastering-chain part of the process for the mastering engineer to do, essentially. Anne, who I’ve worked with at Dubplates & Mastering since 2020—I’ve never really spoken to her directly or anything, but there’s an understanding that I want it to be a little bit gentler than a modern record. It’s a little quieter. I’ve heard my music on Spotify and it’s definitely a few dBs quieter than the average record. But I also feel like it has more dynamics to it. I have a nice hi-fi at home, and when I listen to records there, if they’re really quiet—dynamic—those are the ones that sound the most interesting to me in that context. So I guess in a way, because of my listening habits and how I’m taking in music, the sound of my records now is a little bit gentler, or there’s more going on in the background. I also like that minor psychoacoustic thing. I’m not a sound-designer kind of person, but I like when records have worlds going on in the background.

My impression was that if you heard these tracks in the club, it’d be like, What’s going on here, what am I hearing? There are all kinds of secret things happening in the background that must sound pretty amazing on a big, spatial system.

Speaking of spatial systems [gestures to Dolby Atmos speakers in the the studio]—

Holy cow, wow.

I actually didn’t make the record in this room. We’ll talk about the XL thing in a bit, I’m sure. But I have a funny thing with this room, which is that I was in here for basically 18 months straight and I wasn’t able to make music here.

Where are you right now?

Oh, so I’m in the studio at XL. I’ll show you around on the phone. So yeah, you said spatial, this is the Dolby Atmos system. I do all the Atmos mixes and stuff. This is kind of a bit of a mess right now, but this is the live room. Around the time I put out Orbs, I went to Waking Life, and then I came back and I started a full-time job, which definitely stopped me from making music for a second, because I felt kind of conflicted about my role here—also being an artist and working at a record label, producing with people and engineering, and now I’m basically doing A&R full time.

It’s a lot, and for me to feel OK with it, basically the way I’ve mentally compartmentalized it is that I don’t make any music here. I checked the masters, of course, on this really expensive—if you look behind me, that wall there is all subs. So when people are like, do you have a big sub? I’m like, actually I have a really massive sub that I get to check things on, but I don’t really mix anything here. I feel like I have to have my little room at home, where I’ve made all my music—that’s where I continue to make music. I’ll go home and turn the bass down a bit after hearing it on this system, but I don’t mix anything here. It feels very privileged to come in here. I was just listening to the new Skee Mask record here yesterday. It just sounds crazy. Any sort of Atmos-y immersive audio thing, or even classic records, you just hear every detail. It’s helped me reassess what’s important in my own music with more clarity.

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Let’s take a step back and maybe you can walk me through the production of the album. So you started from scratch when you scrapped the other EP?

Yeah, straightaway. That song “Somebody” actually predated everything, but it’s all in the same production process, basically. The file of “Scanners” was just called “Start Over” for the longest time. I thought of calling it that, but it felt a little too sentimental, maybe. But start over was the idea—a clean slate, I have no new music now, none, and I’m gonna start fresh with this song. Then I basically went from there to the end.

What was that process like? Were you doing things differently, were you trying out new techniques?

It’s kind of hard for me to talk about it without talking about this other thing, which is that I have another record coming out this year….