Nothing about it made sense. With their screaming virtuosity, utterly eerie mindmeld, and shrugging irreverence toward their own astonishing gifts, DOMi & JD BECK seemed beamed in from another dimension, and our familiar existence contorted itself to their presence. The year that they more or less arrived, they bowled over buttoned-up jazz fans with a cover of a Coltrane classic that they renamed “Giant Nuts,” they wowed blunt-puffing hip-hop heads with a dizzying 4 minutes and 20 seconds of live medley-ed Madvillain songs, and they rearranged the rules of pop by jamming with Ariana Grande and Thundercat on a pandemic-era livestream — Domi on keys, head bobbing to the beat while using all four limbs to make a band’s worth of sound, and JD on drums, looking like he’s having the chillest time of his life at roughly 1,000,000 BPM. And that was before they earned two GRAMMY noms including Best New Artist for a debut album (2022’s NOT TiGHT) that featured Herbie Hancock next to Mac DeMarco next to Busta Rhymes, released by the iconic Blue Note Records in partnership with Anderson .Paak’s friskier APESHIT, Inc. label. As their unclassifiable sound then whisked them to stages the world over, the duo were touted as Gen Z ambassadors between eras, genres, and energies… And then — poof! — they vanished, social accounts frozen in time, like the interplanetary visitors many suspected them to be all along. So, you might reasonably ask, what happened to DOMi & JD BECK? WHO ASKED? No, we’re not yelling at you. That’s the answer. WHO ASKED? is the long-awaited sophomore album from the French-born Domi Louna and Texas native JD Beck, and it’s just as surprising as you would expect, but also unlike anything they have done before — somehow both simpler and more complex. On the one hand, there are no special guests unless you count: Zach Hill (Death Grips, Hella) pitching in on sound design, Domi’s brother Noé Degalle adding his own compositional chops to three songs, and .Paak co-writing lyrics to one (“HAD ENOUGH”). On the other hand, there are more contributors than ever: a small sinfonietta of seasoned classical players press-ganged into bringing the duo’s incredibly singular, super maximalist, and strikingly beautiful orchestral vision to life. Oh, and DOMi & JD BECK sing on pretty much every track. It might almost resemble chamber pop, if chamber pop had 50 times as many notes, shifty time signatures, and an overall vibe of jazz-born indietronica cut with verdant flower-child freedom.