Olivia Merilahti and Dan Levy have had a pretty busy summer. They've already been on the road for much of the last six months, and having just wrapped up US Festival dates they're currently on tour in Europe. We were able to snag some time with them over lunch while they were playing a sold-out club show here in NY, which they were more than grateful for.

"This food is really good," Merilahti, The Dø's singer, explains between bites of her egg salad with avocado. "We don't really get these kinds of sandwiches and good vegetables. In France you don't really find places like this, there is a lot of history of bistros where the waiters are very unpleasant and you eat the same thing that isn't always good. So new places for young people are not so easy to find." She does add that she's not as much of a fan of highway rest stops here and the prevalence of sugar in, well, basically everything that you find at a roadside fast food Mecca.

Next to her, Levy leisurely picks quietly at his Mezze Plate of hummus and Baba ghanoush, which may come as a bit of a surprise after hearing the urgency inherent in the group's latest album, 2014's Shake Shook Shaken. " We didn't want to take time to spend hours setting up microphones for each instrument," Levy explains, adding that they built a new studio in the French countryside and then got right to work. "We said, 'Okay let's work like demos, you know?’ We wanted to just be focused on the song to see if it was fitting with what we wanted. The only thing we took time to record was [Merilahti's] voice. It was exactly if we were lost on an island and said we have to make an album."

Merilahti adds that the technological innovations made in recent years also helped them achieve their vision in a concise way. "We definitely wanted to focus on the creative and emotional content that we wanted in the songs, as well as the fact of having something quite immediate," see explains. "With the plug-ins and technical equipment is that you can get something really quickly and get an immediate emotional response with a lot of energy so there are no long introductions [on the album] or anything like that. It was about being straight to the point, and these new tools helped with that."

The result is an impressive collection of songs, such as the electro-tinged single "Despair, Hangover & Ecstasy" which has a masterful blend of both organic and cutting-edge instrumentation—and thankfully the lyrics on the album are just as captivating as the music. "The lyrics are ambiguous so it's a little hard for me to talk about them, but there's a sense of trying to get it together because for us everything was imploding," Merilahti says, referencing the duo's romantic relationship, among others things. "There was also a lot of questioning because there was such chaos..more philosophical and metaphysical questions."

That dichotomy between pop sheen and controlled chaos lies at the core of The Dø's music, so it's no surprise that they feel like these songs translate the best in a small and sweaty setting. "It's always good to play in the club because it's the essence of the music we are doing," Levy explains. "There's a connection with people: You can feel it. You can talk to them, you can touch them. You can feel the real energy in the room." Merilahti adds, "The connection at festivals is almost more like meeting other artists, but I think it's a really good challenge because people don't necessarily know you, so you have to find a new way of performing." 

Luckily it seems as though people will be familiar with The Dø very, very soon. In the meantime they're just happy to get a rare break from the tour bus and get some fresh air before the next show. "You can never say 'Okay, I'm good now,'" Levy says when asked about the band's relentless work ethic. "We love touring and being on the road but some days you just want to find a shower, you know?" 

Yes, we know.