Daphni, known among his orchestral ensemble as Caribou and at the passport office as Dan Snaith, is a Canadian musician and producer of astonishing acclaim, having released eleven studio albums since first breaking through in 2000. The line between Snaith’s two projects has become increasingly blurred in recent years, with the clanging synths and scratch guitar of tracks such as “Odessa” now feeling more like the exception rather than the rule. Daphni’s fingerprints were all over Caribou’s 2024 album Honey, which has been sending jaws spinning across dancefloors since it dropped in October of that year.
Butterfly, out 6th February 2026, sees Snaith take a similar approach, dropping a series of tracks in anticipation of the full-length record. The most notable of these, Waiting So Long, is a thumping slice of bubblegum-influenced disco, built around the wistful refrain “I been waiting so long, without you”—the same kind of yearning vocals that carried 2014’s genre-defining “Can’t Do Without You.” It’s the sort of tune that amalgamates everything that has made both Caribou and Daphni so impactful; mastering the unenviable task of collaborating with yourself. It’s a tremendously high bar that sets the tone for an excellent album.
The new album consistently manages to swerve any notion of predictability, opening with the decidedly off-kilter “Sad Piano House”. Wonky, sporadic piano chords bounce against a percussive instrumental, flowing neatly into the screeching energy of “Clap Your Hands”. From there, the album takes a handful of sharp, experimental turns. “Two Maps” sounds fraught and distorted; “Shifty” picks up that particular mantle but accelerates the BPM. “Talk to Me” and “Goldie” lean into sleazy, Swamp 81-inspired dubstep territory, while “Miles Smiles” feels like something else entirely. It’s difficult at times to know exactly which musical hook this album hangs on.
If you’re looking for an album with a linear narrative, a collection of ambient records to spin at the afters, or an LP of peak-time techno bangers, this most certainly isn’t that. Instead, Daphni’s latest album is all three, a cross-section of the sounds that have left such an indelible mark on the electronic scene over the last two decades.
Snaith alluded to this himself when announcing the album back in November, writing, “weird tracks, club tracks, pop tracks… i just forgot to think about the album was supposed to be and just made whatever struck me.”
The result is more coherent than it has any right to be. The album’s closer, “Eleven,” leans heavily into the seminal ambient-techno sound of Digital Justice’s 1994 masterpiece It’s All Gone Pear Shaped. It’s a gorgeous culmination, whether Daphni is taking inspiration from those strangely emotional early-90s classics or early UK dubstep records, consciously or otherwise. Snaith has reached such an astonishing level of consistency that he may just be taking inspiration from his own earlier work. Daphni has pulled together the countless threads of his own musical metamorphosis, to create the exceptional Butterfly.