Dazzling the world with their euphoric futuristic sound, Nero have been the pioneers of producing commercial dub-step for the past few years. Remixing their way to greatness, they have turned established classics into dance anthems, whilst continually releasing highly acclaimed music of their own. Dan Stephens, one half of the act, takes time out to speak about their rise.

How would you sum up your 2011?
It’s been an amazing year for us. A lot of travelling, a lot of studio time.

It must feel like you’ve come a long way since your debut release in 2004 when you were producing mainly drum and bass. What have been the important breaks to get where you are today?
We weren’t really getting anywhere with drum and bass and were finding it really hard to do anything original, I think we had fallen out of love with it a bit. Once we changed the tempo we were writing at, we suddenly became so much more inspired and creative. We did a bootleg of ‘Blinded by the Lights’ by The Streets; it got a lot of attention and airplay on radio and was eventually released as an official remix. I think that was one of the turning points for us.

In June 2011, you collaborated with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra for Radio 1. That must have been quite an experience for you?
It was an amazing opportunity. Having 90 people playing a piece that you’ve composed is a very humbling experience. It confirmed to us as well that we would love to do orchestral composition a lot more, scoring a film would be awesome.

The album itself, ‘Welcome Reality’, you describe as a conceptual piece telling a story set in 2808. Were there any particular reasons behind the date?
The date comes from a Japanese anime called Cyber City Oedo 808; we used and customised some footage from it in our ‘Innocence’ video. The anime is set in the year 2808; it was visually and idealistically quite a big influence on us when writing the album. It’s also just a cool sounding date and the 808 for us also references the Roland 808 drum synth.

What inspired the story for the album?
It’s not so much a story but more of a theme. Loosely, the album begins with a calm serene intro which evokes the feeling for us of a futuristic metropolis; this then builds into a suggestion of some apocalyptic event that takes place on December 1st 2808. After that there is not so much a story but a series of moods. Very loosely it could be described as a sort of ‘love among the ruins’ type feeling.

Lyrically, where did the ideas come from?
With lyrics, ourselves and Alana often just play around with vowel sounds whilst singing in melody ideas. The first takes will just be us singing gibberish but the vowels will feel natural with the rhythm and melody of the line. From that we’ll then craft words and also the themes for what the song should be about.

The album is really well put together, starting off with the first few tracks setting the futuristic atmospheric scene. How did you go about piecing together the individual tracks?
A lot of the tracks are grouped together by what key they are written in. This makes the segueing of one track to another feel more natural and melodic. We wanted the album to sound almost symphonic as though it was written from beginning to end in the order they appear on the album. We spent quite a while piecing together the track order and writing the transpositions between the tracks.

With your music videos were you trying to portray the story as you saw it in your heads?
Our concept for the sound of the album was a blend of 80s retro with futuristic sounds and we wanted to convey that imagery in the music videos as well. Also, we were keen to set the videos in this world that the album was created around, which can mainly be seen in the videos for ‘Guilt’ and ‘Promises’. In ‘Guilt’, it’s the seedy backstreet deprived side of the city, whereas in ‘Promises’, it’s more the citizen side where the government controls people’s emotions and everything is ultra clean and utopian.

You’ve made your name in part through remixes, obviously ‘Blinded by the Lights’ being one of the breakthroughs as you said. How do you divide your time between remixes and producing your own tracks?
It can be quite nice to take a break from writing original material to work on a remix. It’s a different kind of discipline, with a remix you already have the starting blocks to work from; it’s fun putting your own spin on a song.

If we go before 2001, when the two of you hadn’t met each other, what were your musical roots and inspirations?
We shared a love for acts like Squarepusher and Aphex Twin, also Daft Punk and The Chemical Brothers. We were both into rock and band music as well. I was into the underground drum and bass sound a little before Joe.

Dan, you played Cello for 12 years whilst Joe is a classically trained guitarist. Not instruments you would instantly associate with dub-step producers! Do you guys still play?
Joe plays guitar more often than I play the cello these days, in fact I play guitar more often than I play cello now! I still pick the cello up occasionally though; I’d like to properly get back into it.

What other areas of music would you like to challenge?
We always want to push our sound and experiment with new things, break through the genre boundary and just be an electronic act rather than anything specific.

What can we expect from you in 2012?
A lot of touring across the globe with our live show. Other than that, we’re not quite sure what we expect from us in 2012. We’re booking a couple of months off early next year to start work on the second album; we have a lot of exciting ideas for it.