Artist: NEIL FRANCES as Club NF
Album: CLUB NF VOL. 2 and general artist bio
Label: Nettwerk Music Group
Released: June 2025
Role: Freelance bio writer
CLUB NF houses the club spirit of NEIL FRANCES, the long-running, globe-spanning project of Los Angeles-based artists Jordan Feller and Marc Gilfry. If NEIL FRANCES is the duo's HQ for soulful electro-indie rock, then CLUB NF presents the recreational retreat: a shared space, mentally and physically, to celebrate the dance music that drives their craft. The distinction merits the moniker; these are different yet complementary, cross-pollinated musical outlets. Since their earliest collaborations nearly a decade ago, Feller and Gilfry have aligned on production sensibilities that count rave culture among its myriad influences. NEIL FRANCES songs often feature club-ready grooves, and here, as CLUB NF, the duo fully leans in, bumping up the BPMs, reinterpreting material to sequence across seamless, open-ended live sets. 2025 sees CLUB NF expand with its second volume of music and plans to tour as a two-piece under the alias. Equipped with analog synthesizers, sequencers, drum machines, samplers, CDJs, and pedals for Gilfry's guitar and vocals. The objective is to construct an immersive journey — featuring all-new sound, lighting, and stage production — something as fun and freeing for fans as it's been for the guys, both as performers and patrons of the electronic music community and continuum.
2024 was the biggest year to date for NEIL FRANCES, with the release of It's All A Bit Fuzzier and extensive full-band touring, including appearances at Coachella, Electric Forest, and Bonnaroo. As the stage show has grown, they've become more aware of the audience/performer dynamic, the rituals of song, applause, and so on, from which came a curiosity to design a streamlined set where the focal point shifts, fusing key NF moments with sounds beyond their catalog. "One that is seamless and can also utilize the benefits of a DJ set…you can insert other people's songs into the story you're telling," explains Gilfry. They cite LCD Soundsystem, Soulwax, and BICEP as north stars who've been able to shape-shift their iterations and straddle multiple worlds.
Together they build CLUB NF tracks with this setting in mind, instinctually applying what they've learned from touring the music, bouncing ideas back and forth on their rigs in the studio, and assembling in real-time within the parameters of performance. "It's a different way of writing. Because we have to be able to do it more or less live, we have to keep it simple," says Feller. "But within that simplicity, you can really boil down and distill what the real best bit of the song is, whether it's the bass line or the vocal stuff or the sample or whatever." Having the material deconstructed and "DAWless" (without a computer) gives them more freedom to improvise live and read the room sonically. "The creative fire is just burning so much stronger and brighter when he and I are looking at each other like, should we do this here?" says Gilfry. Feller adds, "It's never the same thing every night, which to me is the most exciting part. We can work right next to each other and, on the spot, decide how long or short to stay somewhere. And there are moments when we can DJ — if there's some mad track out that we happen to love, we can immediately put it in."
Released in late 2024, VOL. 1 reworked three of their best-known tracks, including "dancing", which exemplifies the imagination and fluidity of the project as a whole. The 2022 version collaged tape machine samples from "Storm" by 1980s vocal jazz group Rare Silk with Gilfry's vocal interpolations, stitching the chorus to create the "we're dancing" hook, all harmonized above a bed of drums and bass. That acapella section spoke to them years earlier, back when they used to take on 5-hour gigs as a means of research, with Feller, who DJed his way through college in Australia, giving Gilfry tips from behind the decks. Feller continues, "The fantastic thing about doing those long sets is this X factor when you find something — I'm not really a spiritual person, but it's about as close as I get to any sense of spirituality within this kind of sample culture — I would listen and make notes in my phone like, 'oh, drum break from Paul McCartney,' this, that, and the other is cool. Mark played the Rare Silk acapella, and I remember clocking it and later flipping it quickly in the studio." The new CLUB NF version evolves its origin story, upping the tempo considerably while retaining the original's essence, with heavy saturation and a raw quality inspired by French house.
The treatment is similar for "Teardrops," which appears on VOL. 2. The 2018 NEIL FRANCES track remains one of their most popular, a deft reimagining of Womack & Womack's 1988 soul classic as a slow-burned falsetto affair. For the new CLUB NF version, they sped it back up in a broken beat framework, rendering a heightened sense of euphoria. Choices like these underscore Feller and Gilfry's love for making music and pushing their creativity forward through revision and reinvention.