A billion streams on four songs! That’s an incredible achievement. How does it feel?

Thank you. Yeah, it is hard to compute those numbers. I can’t really understand what a billion means [laughs]. But it’s amazing. It’s just so crazy that the songs have had such a life of their own and gone all around the world. It was special to receive that fourth which was for our song ‘Solo’ with Demi Lovato, a sexy breakup song that we made when I broke up with my boyfriend ages ago – and then we got back together, so it was quite funny.

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The only other UK artists in the club are Queen, Coldplay, Arctic Monkeys, and One Direction…

That’s insane. I think when we started, with our first song “Rather Be,” we never had any idea it would go in the charts. And that was at the beginning of Spotify starting and streaming. So it was such a big change in the whole music industry.

Clean Bandit has achieved significant chart success, with ten UK Top 10 singles, including four No. 1 hits. Do you feel pressure to keep turning out the same amount of hits?

It doesn’t really feel like pressure. Because we’re a group, I think the way our different roles work, kind of allows it to keep happening. Jack [Patterson], my bandmate, he’s just constantly coming up with melodies and chords. As soon as I hear them, I know people will love this all over the world. I just believe in everything that he creates so much, and then we just have fun with it. With the music videos as well, we’ve had complete creative freedom with those. Making those little films has been such a big part of what we do, and a big part of the songs travelling. I saw the other day “Rockabye” has almost 3 billion views on YouTube. We always just wanted to make music videos, because we were always obsessed with MTV. We don’t tend to think about chart success, but there was a time, a few years ago, when people in our team, in the record label, had pressure on them to keep doing that. So we were trying to block our ears and not hear any of that [laughs].

Do you think you know what a Clean Bandit hit is going to sound like now then, you almost have an ear for it?

Yeah, I think that’s been a big part of my role in the project. I just get so excited when I hear a hit [laughs]. When we started, we used to test the songs in a live setting. “Rather Be” we were playing in festivals, just small festivals, but we could really tell the reaction of the crowd to that song was so different from any others. Then we asked Jess [Glynne] to sing it, and it kind of went crazy. The video that we made in Japan, because of that as well, we’ve been able to perform loads in Japan, because the video kind of went crazy there.

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10 years on from your debut, how has your creative process evolved?

Well, we never test songs live now. We always choose them first, but maybe we should actually because it is an interesting process. We collaborate with a lot of songwriters, and lyricists, in particular, because we tend to focus on the chords and the production and the melodies. We collaborate with so many different guest singers on every song, so we tend to have all kinds of people coming into our studio and we tend to write songs in a day. And if it’s not finished in one day, the actual song composition, it never gets finished. It’s something about the excitement of the process, and if it doesn’t finish in one day, we know it’s not really going to work. And then the production, we spend months on different production ideas. The song that we’re about to release, we’ve actually been working on for about four years, maybe nearly five! We’ve done so many different productions of it.

What’s taken so long? Did you really want to nail the production and make it perfect?

No actually – the version that we’re gonna release is a very early version that we made years ago. We’ve gone in so many different directions and then gone back to the purest form of the song. But the reason it’s taken so long is that there are two features on the song and the timetables of all artists had to align. And that’s one of the biggest challenges that we have. Because we don’t have a singer in the band, when someone sings it, and it sounds perfect, we don’t want to change it for any reason. So we had to wait until the timelines collided. But meanwhile, we made millions of other songs. I’m so happy that it’s finally gonna come out.

When it comes to making new music, how precious are you about killing songs that don’t seem to be working? If you really believe in a track, do you try everything you can to make it work, or do you move on to the next?

For me, it’s a general thing. I don’t like to give up on any song, because I love them. I love them all! But this has definitely been the longest battle, to get this one out into the world. Over the past few years, we’ve made way more songs than we ever have before, because we used to work much slower and make one and then release it. We spent a few months on the production for the one song, then a few months on the video and put it out, and then made another one. Whereas now, we’ve got such a huge catalogue of unreleased songs. It is becoming challenging to be so attached to all of them. But I am still. They will all come out.

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So there must be some collaborations that have happened, but the songs never made it out into the public realm. Spill the tea…

Yeah. We’ve got one with Sam Smith and one with Elton John, which we made a long time ago, but most of them don’t have the artists singing on them, because we tend to write with a songwriter/lyricist. So most of the demos don’t have [singers] – normally it’s the final stage when we consider who’s going to sing this. But the one with Sam Smith we wrote together, and the one with Elton we wrote together. That’s always really cool when the singers are writers as well because it’s much more of an organic process for them than when we DM people saying, ‘Do you want to sing this?’ And then it’s a bit hit and miss, whether the lyrics will resonate with them or not.

Do you really just DM these celebrity singers?

Yeah, normally DMing is how we do it. We normally think about the voice after. When we try and write for a specific voice, it always ends up being a kind of pastiche of what we think they might like, whereas if we just make the song in a pure way for how the song’s supposed to be, and then just listen to it, it’s quite quick to hear who would sound good. It’s normally just Rihanna.

Hopefully that’s one of the songs in the vault, then.

Oh my gosh, yeah, that would be amazing.

Sonically, what can we expect from the next single?

I think they all have a classic, Clean Bandit sound, especially the first one that we’re going to release. It’s got a lot of violin and cello. It’s a lot of different styles of music. It’s in a house tempo, but it’s got various musical influences in it. But then the next one that we’re going to release is completely different and it’s very fast, almost trance music. It’s trance tempo, but it’s got a reggaeton backbeat. I’d say it’s almost like a new genre, that one. It’s got really nice violin and cello parts as well, and it’s quite emotional, an emotional banger hopefully!

The contemporary music landscape seems to be evolving at break-neck speed. Having been together for a decade, how do you feel Clean Bandit has evolved alongside these changes?

I think until we released our second album, we never really listened to much music because we were just in the studio all the time, and doing our own thing. That was a cool way to create because we didn’t get torn in different directions. But then after we dropped our second album, the record label was really coming on strong about what they thought we should be doing and we did wobble for a moment, but now we’re fully creating in our old way. Even this first song that we’re gonna release, it’s classic Clean Bandit but we’ve always been interested in the unexpected juxtaposition of sound worlds. It feels good to be doing that in a very free way.

Will we be getting live shows with these new releases?

Well, we’re creating a really exciting new show at the moment. But we’re not going to be performing in the UK and Europe this summer, because we’re focusing on making music videos, and songs. Probably towards the end of this year, we’ll do one special performance in London. And then next year, we’ll be touring again.

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