“I look at how The Chemical Brothers do it; that’s how live electronic music should be performed”: Will Clarke on his debut album and live setListening back to his earlier records, Will Clarke sounds like a completely different producer. He excelled as a Dirtybird prodigy in the mid-10s, delivering punch-packing, booty-shakin’ house tracks, and he’s since grown into a diverse star of 4/4 dance music. He’s released records on labels that span the far reaches of the genre such as Green Velvet’s Relief, Adam Beyer’s Truesoul, and the legendary German trendsetter, Kompakt.
Now, Clarke is beginning a new era in his career. He is producing his debut album Midnight Mass and he’s focusing on curating the album’s accompanying hardware-driven live show, as opposed to strictly DJing as he has been for the past 20 years. Both of these new endeavours see the producer creating at the top of his game.

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Ever since Clarke’s early years listening to early electronic music stars like The Chemical Brothers, Faithless, and Moby, he has been building towards making an album. Living in those long shadows catalyzed immense inspiration, but he also felt self-doubt at the prospect of making a body of work up to that soaring standard.
“I’ve always wanted to do an album. But I just never felt I was good enough,” Clarke says. Before Midnight Mass, he completed producing a series of tracks in sequence but they never became a full-fledged album because he always ended up comparing himself to his idols. “They’re all absolutely huge artists, but sonically, quality of the songs, quality of production, did it ever match that? The answer was, ‘no.’ So, it was always back to the drawing board.”
Clarke’s goal for making an album wasn’t to become as big as The Chemical Brothers. Midnight Mass is coming into the world because he is confident he is creating a comprehensive body of work just as Ed Simons and Tom Rowlands have done since 1995.
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“I got to the point where I was listening to my influences, then listen to [my album], and it’s on par. The songs fit together. They’re great songs. The production is far superior to where my production was back when I wanted to start doing albums,” Clarke says. “It was a moment when I was like, ‘Okay, well, now’s the time to do it.’”
A key hurdle Clarke had to overcome to reach this point was to write music for purposes other than DJing. In listening to Midnight Mass, the tracks could certainly work in a DJ set, but there are more layers to them as well.
In the first moments of the album, listeners might think they hit play on the wrong record; it starts with suspenseful orchestral string trills comparable to Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries. But that’s the kind of musicality spread throughout Midnight Mass. 11 out of the 13 tracks feature vocalists, all of whose melodies he had a hand in writing.
Clarke has developed his talent for sensibility over the last few years after doing numerous writing sessions with different artists. He’s done many with collaborators on the album like Hayley May and Mitch Jones, but also artists in the wider scene such as HAYLA and Clem Douglas.
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“Every time I went into a session with somebody the mission objective was always, ‘Let’s just have fun and see what we make’,” Clarke says. He also rejected the idea of letting an artist’s previous work (including his own) influence what they made in a session. Just because he’s known for making house music, he didn’t have to write house music.
Similarly, Hayley May is known for singing on major house records such as Heaven by the DJ Mag Top 100 icons Dimitri Vegas & Like Mike. But when she and Clarke were writing together, he asked her who her favourite vocalist of all time was.
“She said, ‘Lauryn Hill,’ and I was like, ‘Let’s write an R&B record.’ Let’s do something that we both can have fun with. Then I’ll go away and turn it into what I need to turn into,” Clarke says. The results were Be My Baby and Need Some Time.
“After I completed [those records], that was the first time when I was like, ‘Now I know this is gonna be an album.’ Now I know that this music we’re making is bigger than just a club record. It opens out to a bigger world. It opens out to a bigger listenership,” Clarke says.

The word “big” is apposite in describing Midnight Mass. Across the album, the tracks harness a truly massive feel whether through vocals or production. Weekend Love employs the full power of House Gospel Choir, letting the 20+ voices rip over a seething melodic techno beat. Georgia Meek’s operatic voicework carries Memories on a foundation of slamming piano chords.
When asked why Clarke went so big on his album, he again references his primary influences who share a similar massive quality. But other than big sounds, he wanted this record to bring out big emotions.
“A lot of people don’t know what I’m trying to achieve because they’re used to me being ‘DJ Will Clarke.’ But throughout all of my production over the years since 2018, when I left the Dirtybird era, it was always like, ‘How do I evoke emotion in my music?’,” Clarke says.
On Midnight Mass an important vehicle for emotion in his production was the Hans Zimmer Strings sample pack from Spitfire Audio. Clarke has always had an affection for film music, and funnily enough, the only orchestra he’s ever seen live was Hans Zimmer’s performance at Coachella in 2017.
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Clarke is sure to remark he’s fortunate to be able to afford the $799 price tag for the pack. But his goal is to generate emotion, so, as he says: “It’s Hans Zimmer. There’s no one better.”
“The amazing thing with a string, you can literally hold a G note and it just evokes so much tension, and that’s just one note,” Clarke says. “If I pulled up the Moog and did the same thing it’s not gonna do the same. There’s just a level where strings cut through in a mix. It lifts everyone up.”
Another new bit he used for the album was the Teletone Audio Scarbo soft synth. He appreciated that it sounded analogue without emulating another analogue synth.
“It’s the weirdest fucking synth,” Clarke says. “There’s so many soft synths that emulate a Juno or something like that. We don’t need another one of those. You can buy a cheap version of those. I really like the creativity of that synth. It sounds so rich and it does sound analogue but it’s not.”
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Other than that, much of the production equipment he used to make Midnight Mass was the same as his previous records. For plugins and effects, SoundToys makes some of his favourites.
“There’s not a single record on the album that SoundToys isn’t used,” Clarke says.
Hardware such as the handmade Russian drum machine, AVP ADS-7, and the Moog Sub 37 are staples in his studio, and he’s using these familiar machines to build out his debut live show for the Midnight Mass tour.
All of Clarke’s biggest influences perform live, and for his live set, he’ll create music with an array of hardware while custom visuals run in the background. The full tech breakdown of the live show is in the video below, and for the visuals, Clarke produced a short film to coincide with the set.

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“For me, the live set is a storytelling of the night. The show is narrated from intro to midtro to outro,” Clarke says. “I look at how The Chemical Brothers do it. That is how, in my opinion, live electronic music should be performed.”
As Clarke’s skills and scope for his project align more and more with his influences, he is also facing another ramification: celebrity proximity. The Chemical Brothers have collaborated with famous musicians like Q-Tip, Beck, and Noel Gallagher. Unfortunately, Clarke’s interactions are far less exciting.Instead of getting offers to work, he got a request from DJ Snake to take Summit.
In the past, some of Clarke’s songs have ended up in the hands of major headliners like DJ Snake through contractual headaches engrained into the music industry. As Clarke’s skills and scope for his project align more and more with his influences, he is also facing another ramification: celebrity proximity. The Chemical Brothers have collaborated with famous musicians like Q-Tip, Beck, and Noel Gallagher. Unfortunately, Clarke’s interactions are far less exciting. But this time he wasn’t letting go of anything on this album. He was involved with literally every phase of its making. Every production session and writing session, giving his input on the lyrics and melodies. He was in the room when it was mixed and mastered.
“There’s a creative part of every single process. And the only way for me to get that across is to be in the room. There’s a feeling that you get whilst you’re in the room with somebody that you can’t give feedback on through email or telephone. You have to feel it,” Clarke says.
The only thing left is the live show, where people on the dancefloor will feel exactly what he felt in all those sessions. It’s a feeling he’s been building towards his entire career.
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