Caribou returns to Toronto riding a wave of optimism with three shows at Danforth Music Hall

Last spring, amid an endless string of lockdowns and widespread misery, Dan Snaith latched on to a glimmer of hope on the horizon.

“As a former math guy (Snaith has a Ph.D in mathematics), right from the beginning I thought: the only thing that’s going to get us out of this is science,” he told the Star. “And suddenly there’s this amazing feat of turning around a bunch of super highly effective vaccines in less than a year. It’s just insane, and so inspiring to me.”

Holed up in his basement studio, Snaith — better known by the moniker Caribou — started writing new music that he says was “literally made off the rush of vaccines starting to roll out.”

“Every day, it was like: ‘My sister got vaccinated! My parents are vaccinated! Somebody else got vaccinated! … It’s coming!’”

The first taste of that inspiration is “You Can Do It,” an almost absurdly exuberant Caribou track that arrived in the summer, just as parts of the world began to emerge from the stupor of a devastating third wave. Built around a rapidly-sequenced vocal sample, a simple chord progression and a house beat, the track’s second half blossoms into a thrilling crescendo of unabashed optimism.

The accompanying music video, inspired by the 1986 Disney movie “Flight of the Navigator,” features dozens of adorable dogs chasing frisbees in slow motion, a visual that manages to heighten the song’s dizzying buoyancy.

Snaith decided to release “You Can Do It” as a stand-alone single, something he’d rarely done in the past. “I thought, this is when it’ll resonate with people. There’s nothing wrong with being unashamedly positive and excited about this moment.”

Over the course of two decades, Snaith, a native of Dundas, Ontario, has built a sprawling catalogue of music that spans and blends together multiple genres and styles.

His early work, originally released under the name Manitoba in the early 2000s, took the form of sophisticated, downtempo electronica — a genre pioneered by artists like Aphex Twin and Boards of Canada and sometimes referred to as “intelligent dance music,” or IDM. Manitoba’s debut album, “Start Breaking My Heart,” which Snaith recorded while a student at the University of Toronto, was met with widespread critical acclaim. (In 2017, Pitchfork named it one of the top 50 IDM albums of all-time.)

In 2003, Snaith moved to the UK to pursue his Ph.D in mathematics at the Imperial College of London (his thesis was titled “Overconvergent Siegel Modular Symbols”). A renewed interest in 60s rock records and crate digging for drum breaks inspired him to incorporate vocals and live instrumentation into his music, culminating in the glittering neo-pyschedelia of Caribou’s Polaris Prize-winning 2008 album “Andorra.”

Throughout the 2010s, Snaith’s music continued to evolve, incorporating elements of deep house, R&B, pop and hip-hop on 2010s “Swim” and 2014’s “Our Love,” which was nominated for a Grammy for best dance/electronic album. Over the past decade, he’s also released three studio albums of pristine, club-ready dance music under the DJ alias Daphni.

What seems to unite this expansive body of music is Snaith’s steady sense of optimism, always present, whether expressed in the form of joyous catharsis or subtle hopefulness.

“That’s just who I am,” Snaith explained over Zoom ahead of Caribou’s long-delayed North American tour, set to kick off this week with three shows at the Danforth Music Hall.

“I’m someone who tries to put a positive spin on things, and deals with difficult things by making something positive out of them.”

Indeed, hope pervades Caribou’s most recent LP, “Suddenly,” which came out in late February of 2020. The album is Snaith’s most personal project yet, featuring songs about yearning, loss and grief, each wrapped in brightly-coloured melodies and expertly-crafted dance grooves. On “You and I,” he sings about a death in his family. On “Home,” he tells the story of a friend who found the courage to leave a toxic relationship.

“I mean, it’s in the title,” Snaith said. “It’s about sudden, unexpected changes in your life and learning to adapt to them.”

And while on previous albums Snaith used his voice sparingly, it’s often pushed to the forefront on “Suddenly.”

In a five-star review of the album in The Guardian, critic Alexis Petridis described Snaith’s voice as “fragile, untutored and unshowy, the diametric opposite of the kind of melodramatic firework display that’s usually held to constitute Good Singing in 2020 — but it turns out remarkably impactful.”

“You don’t realise how accustomed your ears have become to Auto-Tuned perfection until you hear someone who actually sounds like a human being rather than a cyborg programmed to perform vocal calisthenics: it hits you emotionally in a way that melismatic feats of strength and endurance simply don’t.”

Mere days after the album was released, the pandemic was declared. In the chaotic and fearful weeks that followed, Snaith figured that no one would really listen to “Suddenly.” Instead, the pandemic created the unique conditions for his fans to engage with the music in a deeper, more meaningful way.

“All of a sudden everybody was in that position of trying to figure out how to make something constructive or just at least deal with the kind of cataclysmic sudden change,” he said. “I had lots of great feedback. People were just messaging me directly saying, ‘I’ve been locked down here or there and listening. This music has really helped me,’ which isn’t at all what I’d anticipated.”

“It felt like there was a real purpose to the music.”

Sitting in his small basement studio at his home in London, some 20 months later, Snaith sounds excited to finally hit the road with his band (Caribou has performed live with the same band since they formed in 2003). They performed a handful of shows and festivals over the summer, which Snaith described as “magical.”

“Everybody in the crowd just had a big smile on their face.”

Snaith says the last couple of years have been challenging, filled with ups and downs. Bubbled with his wife and two young daughters, he found home-schooling to be a difficult, but ultimately rewarding experience: “I would have been away for those years of my kids’ life,” he said.

But Snaith also had to care for his father, who was terminally ill — a situation complicated by the uncertainty of the pandemic.

“Every time there was a decision about whether he should go into hospital and get something checked out or whether I could go visit him — all those things were made difficult by the situation. I had to learn to adjust … I’m sure everybody has their own version of that story. But yeah, it feels like an eternity.”

Despite not releasing much original music, Snaith kept busy with other projects. Last winter, he released “Suddenly Remixes,” a collection of reimagined Caribou tracks, some recorded by his friends – Four Tet, Floating Points, Morgan Geist — and some recorded by artists who excited him in the early stages of the pandemic — Logic1000, India Jordan, Prince Nifty.

In the fall, to celebrate the 20th anniversary of his debut album, Snaith reissued a trio of early albums: “Start Breaking My Heart,” 2003’s “Up in Flames” and 2005’s “The Milk of Human Kindness.”

Listening to his older records now, one can’t help but marvel at how much Snaith’s sound has evolved. And yet, remarkably, regardless of the genre, every song bears his unique signature: the intricate drum patterns, Snaith’s delicately expressed falsetto, and the way sounds are carefully layered and piled on top of each other, like a Jenga tower threatening to topple.

“I think it just kind of emerges through the process of doing, you know? I’ve spent endless, endless, endless hours of my life making music and it just kind of emerges — the sense of melody or sense of harmony or sense of rhythm,” he explains.

“At some level, I’m always trying to change. And then at another level, the thing that I’ve come to realize is that I can’t change even if I wanted to, and it’s the thing that’s most likely to make my music unique.”

It’s been two years since Snaith has set foot on Canadian soil. And though he’s surrounded by his immediate family in the UK, many of his closest friends are here. “Canada is still home in some kind of deep, internal sense,” he says. “The landscape and the people and everything.”

As for Toronto, it’s the only place he gets nervous before a show, “which tells you a lot.”

Asked about what fans heading to the Danforth this week should expect, Snaith says the bulk of the show is “just a big dance party.”

“People don’t want to go out and see introspective music right now … People want to come and have a good time. I want people to have a good time.”

“That’s our job.”