Pendulum are back after a 10-year hiatus

On Mar. 20, 2016, Rob Swire and Gareth McGrillen experienced one of the most important moments of their careers. Neither of them remember it.

The pair were headlining the mainstage at Ultra Music Festival in Miami, closing the weekend with a dual set composed of music from their two acts — the bass-focused duo Knife Party, and the drum & bass five-piece Pendulum. It was the first time they’d played as the latter act since 2010, reuniting at the request of Ultra’s executive producer Adam Russakoff.

The pressure was intense — they weren’t sure if their instruments were going to work due to technical issues. When they got onstage, they both just kind of blacked out. An hour and fifteen minutes later, the show was over, and Pendulum was back.

You guys haven’t released new Pendulum music in nearly a decade. Why now?

Swire: If you don’t bring it back within 10 years, it’s almost not worth doing at all, so it’s almost as good a time as any.

How connected do you feel to drum & bass at this point? 

Swire: [We’ve] definitely got a love-hate relationship with it. We obviously come from that world, at least Pendulum does, and it’s the first scene that sort of accepted us, so we kind of owe it in that way, but there’s a bittersweet thing too. D&B has never really taken off too much in the US, so it’s hard to get a good perspective of it sometimes, but in the U.K. it was mainstream.

I think the scene had quite a hard time accepting us, especially in the underground. It was like, right, well first of all these are two guys from Australia, they’re not even from the UK. Second of all, one of guys wants to sing and the other guys wants to play a f–king bass. In D&B you want to have a female vocalist and jazz influences, so I think they had a hard time accepting us.

https://www.billboard.com/music/music-news/pendulum-interview-9451690/