Dolder: “If we weren’t identical twins, it would be a nightmare”
The Newcastle-based duo talk songwriting, working with family, and tease new material.
Photo: Rosie Tonkin
2025 was a year of firsts for Dolder, a singer-songwriter duo made up of identical twins, Dani and Zara. They released their first single, played their first shows while supporting Ben Ellis on tour, and wrapped up the year with the release of their first EP. Despite being in the early stages of their career, the duo are already making a mark on fans thanks to their intimate lyrics and lush harmonies. We had the pleasure of chatting to the girls in one of their first interviews to talk all things songwriting, growing up in a musical family, and new music to come.
Although they’ve only just started formally releasing their work, music has always played a large role in Dani and Zara’s lives. Their father and former Prefab Sprout drummer, Steve Dolder, fostered their love of music from a young age. “We were obsessed with The Beatles. Our first crushes were John Lennon and George Harrison. And dad tells this story: when we were about five or six, we were sat in the back of the car and just harmonising to The Beatles without realising,” Zara explains. “It’s just been ingrained in us. We’ve been singing together forever, and then, when we were about ten or eleven, we started writing.”
“They were absolute rubbish,” Zara quips when describing their earliest material. However, the twins kept at it and, as COVID struck during their teenage years, they began to take it more seriously. During that time they were constantly producing new material.
“We did fuck all but write, which was great and a brilliant learning curve cause we’d record our demos at home. And dad would help us, and he’d drum for us. It was all really wholesome to be honest,” Dani explains. Steve Dolder was also not the only one getting involved in creating the twins’ early material. “There was a time where all of dad’s musician friends didn’t have anything to do either, so we sent our demos to them, and they would just come back playing whatever they wanted over the top. It was really fun,” Dani elaborates. “And dad would be like ‘I’ve just had the guitar track back’ and we’d run upstairs and listen to it all together.”
The inspiration for their earliest songs was often found in unexpected places. “I mean, we didn’t have much to write about at that age, so we would watch Friends and make notes on the episodes and then write about them,” Dani says.
“It was really just using the tools that you had in front of you, not being able to leave the house and trying to find some human experience,” Zara adds. “The music we’ve grown up on, like The Beatles and the Eagles, all of their writing is storytelling, so we just had to tell a story, and that’s the most important thing about a song.”
While they started their writing journey with others’ stories, Dani and Zara now favour a much more personal approach. “Now we use our own lives,” Dani says. Although the writing process itself varies from song to song, certain ideas spark from mutual writing sessions while others start independently and are refined as a duo. “It’s about like 70/30. 70 percent being [writing] separately, 30 percent being joined,” Dani explains. “Also, if you listen to who’s singing which part and which lyrics, you’ll understand whose story it is. So, like if it’s one story that’s really prominent to me, I’ll take the chorus.”
Their debut single, Charlie, which deals with the struggles of love and heartbreak, is an amalgamation of both twins’ experience. “We were both in the studio, and one of us had the opening line, and I was like ‘oh my god, that is so this person’ and [Zara] was like ‘but it’s about this person’ and I was like ‘Charlie is all of these people’,” Dani says.
“Charlie is loads of people,” Zara chimes in, speaking to the universal relatability of the song. “The thing is, it also translated into our friends’ relationships. That was a fun one because we could just make a list of names.”
Charlie was then followed by The Motive, the twins’ debut EP, which tackles issues of self-worth following a breakup. “[It’s] like the best feeling ever. And it’s the weirdest thing, seeing our faces on Spotify,” Zara remarks while reflecting on what it’s like for the project to be out in the world.
“I know, I look at it every day,” Dani adds. “It was the weirdest feeling because it’s been so long-awaited and I feel like I’ve gone through those feelings in my head for so long that, when it happened, I was like ‘Oh, that just feels kind of normal’.”
When asked about how they found the fan response to the project, the twins agree the experience has been unreal and found themselves surprised by how quickly their community has already grown. “I’m in complete sort of denial because I’m like ‘they’re not fans, they’re just like our friends’. They’re just like our online friends, which is adorable,” Dani says. “It’s really strange because obviously we don’t have like a massive platform yet and we’re very much in the early stages but to have such obsession from certain fans and respect and excitement is a really strange feeling… but they’ve all been so amazing and to see like comments or get messages about how the songs relate to them or their friends’ situations.”
While this moment in time is quite surreal, there was little time to process it all as they’d already started working on their next project. “We’ve been making the second EP since November, before the first one actually came out, so we had almost like halfway detached from that world and put ourselves into the world of the second EP,” Zara says. When asked what more they could share about what’s to come from Dolder, Zara shared, “We have a single coming out in February, which is one that we played live, and I think that will be [a] deluxe [single] off the end of the first EP. And then the second EP will be coming shortly after. We’re very, very excited about it.”
While the first EP was recorded in Newcastle, the second EP was recorded in New York, bringing a different energy to the project. “We loved the first EP because it was done at home, and we could drive home and we were staying with family, which was lovely. And then we had this new business around the second EP and chaos with being in a city like that, which was so inspiring. It just made you want to get up and go,” Zara says.
“Yeah, we were up at like half eight every day, walking to the studio like ‘when can we go?’,” Dani jokes. “It’s been a really surreal experience being able to do that, and I think the change of pace sort of represents the growth between the first EP and the second EP. It’s a nice transition into something a bit bigger.”
The experience of releasing music and touring has been made all the more special for the girls as they’ve gotten to do it alongside each other. “We’ve been best friends for forever. I mean, when we did the Ben Ellis tour, the last night we just cried the whole way through the last song and like all the fans were crying with us,” Zara recalls.
“I couldn’t do it on my own. I don’t know how solo artists do it. I think if we weren’t identical twins and we were sisters, it would be a fucking nightmare. We would just be clashing,” Dani adds, “Because our brains are exactly the same, like we think and want the same things all the time, it makes it really easy to work together and to have these experiences together. We also know how each other work, we know each other’s algorithm through and through.”
Having a dad who has been through the same things has also proved invaluable. “He’s the triplet,” Dani jokes, “He’s the third member and, honestly, if it wasn’t for dad, we would not be pursuing music at all, I don’t think.” Steve would play the girls records of great artists like Steely Dan, The Doobie Brothers, Eagles, Glen Campbell and Carole King, which had a large impact on the twins from an early age. “If it wasn’t for dad believing in us so much, we wouldn’t believe that we could do it. He is our best friend, and he’s the funniest man I’ve ever met,” Dani adds.
The Motive is out now via EMI.