DOMi + JD Beck

Nancy, Dallas, and a trade show in between

Domi Louna — born Domitille Degalle — grew up in France at a piano, a keyboard and a drum kit from the age of three, and was studying at the Conservatoire de Nancy by five. JD Beck grew up near Dallas, began on piano at five and switched to drums at nine, picking up mentorship from Robert "Sput" Searight of Snarky Puppy along the way. They met at the NAMM trade show in 2018, crossed paths again a month later at Erykah Badu's birthday celebration, and started working together from there.

What carried them outward was a run of self-posted performance videos: two people in a room, one camera angle, playing material at a density that tends to need a second watch. By 2021 the attention had turned into work — they co-wrote "Skate" for Silk Sonic, the Anderson.Paak and Bruno Mars project — and then into a contract, signing to.Paak's APESHIT label in partnership with Blue Note Records.

Not Tight, and the guest list

The first single, "Smile", arrived in April 2022. The debut album Not Tight followed on 29 July 2022, and it was stacked with names: Herbie Hancock, Anderson.Paak, Bruno Mars and Ariana Grande all appear on it. Reviews held up — Metacritic logged an average of 82 from five of them — and the record brought two Grammy nominations, for Best New Artist and for Best Contemporary Instrumental Album.

Then the gap. Four years passed between studio albums, which is a long time for a pair who arrived as a novelty of speed and youth and had to decide what came after that.

The orchestra detour

The second record started as someone else's commission. In early 2024 the duo were booked to play with the Metropole Orkest in the Netherlands, which meant taking their existing catalogue and orchestrating it properly — parts on paper, for players who read. They did the work in Sibelius, the notation software, and the method stuck.

So the new album was written the same way, away from instruments entirely: roughly four months of composing in Sibelius before either of them played a note of it. Domi has described the result as every single note being written that way, and learning to play their own songs afterwards as the fun part. The stated aim was that every note should mean something and nothing be left to chance. The working routine behind it ran for more than two years on an eight-eight-eight split — eight hours of sleep, eight of music, eight of rest — with three or four days off a month.

Who Asked? and its instrumental twin

Who Asked? came out on 31 July 2026 on APESHIT and Blue Note: fifteen compositions, mostly cut at their home studio in Dallas, and — in a deliberate reversal of the debut — not a single guest feature. Instead both of them sing, on nearly every track. A small ensemble of classical players was recorded separately, and a full orchestra appears on three songs, which took over 100 hours to capture, multiple takes of each individual musician. Zach Hill, of Death Grips and Hella, handled sound design. Domi's brother Noé Degalle contributed to three compositions, and Anderson.Paak co-wrote the lyrics to "HAD ENOUGH". The record's organising theme is time, which Domi has tied to being surrounded by people who care a great deal about age. The accompanying visuals, shot by cinematographer Tehillah de Castro, take their cues from Kubrick and Kurosawa.

Blue Note's own line is that the album is simpler and more complex than the debut at once, and the reviews have broadly accepted that framing. Jazz Weekly heard modern classical atmospheres crossed with synth-pop, singling out "HAD ENOUGH" for its indie lilt, "EXiT" for its pop logic and "CLiMBiNG HiGH" for its electronic finish, and closed with the verdict that someone answered. KNKX described fifteen short pieces that are equal parts simple and impossibly complicated. The New York Times has called them the virtuoso jazz-and-beyond duo, re-emerging with ever more intricate songs.

On 14 August 2026, two weeks after the album, they released You Asked! — the same fifteen tracks as instrumentals, 53 minutes, with the vocals stripped out. Whatever else it is, it is a tacit acknowledgement that the singing was the part people would argue about.

Where things stand in October 2026

The American leg of the Who Asked? tour covered 25 cities and 26 dates, opening at home in Dallas in early September and running coast to coast into mid-October: Sony Hall in New York on 24 September, Park West in Chicago on 29 September, the Fillmore in Minneapolis on 30 September, Neumos in Seattle on 5 October, Bimbo's 365 Club in San Francisco on 9 October and The Bellwether in Los Angeles on 11 October. Portland's Wonder Ballroom sold out. The routing stayed in rooms of a few hundred to around a thousand rather than anything larger.

Next are three Australian dates, their first there since 2024, promoted by Frontier Touring with Penny Drop and on general sale since 7 August 2026: 170 Russell in Melbourne on 10 November, the Metro Theatre in Sydney on 12 November and The Triffid in Brisbane on 13 November. After that comes Singapore — the Esplanade Annexe Studio on 1 December, an 8pm standing-room show in the Mosaic Music Series, tickets from $67.50. The publicly listed calendar currently runs to four shows across two countries, with the three Australian dates the live block on sale.

What the show actually is

The 2026 live format is the pair plus the orchestra on tape. At the Montreal Jazz Festival, on the free Rogers Stage, they played about an hour of then-unreleased Who Asked? material over prerecorded orchestral backing, soloing over it, accompanying it and pushing against it. PAN M 360's Vitta Morales credited the musicianship that made their name in 2022 but found the set short on compositional variety, and judged the backing tracks a constraint — until the last two songs, when they abandoned the tapes, turned to each other and the chemistry noticeably lifted.

By the New York date on 24 September the set had tightened. They opened with Weather Report's "Fast City", then worked through Who Asked? instrumentally, leaving the album's vocals off the stage. The review in NYS Music described them seated facing one another, Domi composed at stacked keyboards, Beck in constant motion but playing unusually square — even volume, clean execution, little dynamic shaping — and picked out "EXiT", "LOVELY MASQUERADE" for its bassline and "CLiMBiNG HiGH". The crowd enjoyed Beck's claim to be super rusty rather more than the playing supported it. The reviewer's conclusion was that jazz does not feel like the right label for any of it.

Staging is deliberately bare: two players, stacked keyboards, and a custom kit that in Montreal carried a suspended metal chair where a ride cymbal would normally sit. None of the announcements for the Australian or Singapore shows list a support act, and the Esplanade bills the running time at an hour and fifteen minutes with no interval.