The Dø

The dø
The Dø performing at the Paléo Festival in 2008.
Background information
Origin	Paris, France
Genres	Folk rock, indie rock
Years active	2007–present
Labels	Get DOwn! Cinq7 (France) Six Degrees (US) Ministry of Sound (Germany) Rockhopper Music (Finland) Border Music (Sweden) Shock Records (Australia) Bang Music (Belgium)
Website	Official website
Members	Dan Levy Olivia Bouyssou Merilahti

The dø is a French/Finnish indie pop band founded in Paris in 2005. The band is composed of Olivia Merilahti (singer and musician) and Dan Levy (multi-instrumentalist). The duo has been backed on stage by three different drummers: Jérémie Pontier (2007–08), José Joyette (2008–09), and Pierre Belleville (since 2009). Their first studio album A Mouthful topped the French charts in 2008, making them the first French act singing in English to reach that position.

Olivia Merilahti and Dan Levy met in 2005 while recording the music for the French film Empire of the Wolves directed by Chris Nahon and produced by Gaumont.

They released their first piece under the name The dø a few months later: a three-track EP including "The Bridge Is Broken" for a contemporary dance ballet titled Scène d'amour by Finnish choreographer Juha-Pekka Marsalo. They kept on working for cinema (The Passenger, awarded at the Festival d'Angers and the Festival d'Aubagne; Wild Camp; and Darling), dance (Prologue, Perle and Cinderella by Juha-Pekka Marsalo, as well as poetry lectures by Carolyn Carlson) and theatre (Laure by Colette Peignot).

They used their free time to write the songs that would feature on their first album, A Mouthful. The band's Myspace page was opened in 2007. The first four songs released online ("The Bridge is Broken", "At Last", "On My Shoulders" and "Playground Hustle") quickly created a buzz that brought them to play a series of sold-out concerts in Paris. In December 2007, they opened the festival Les Transmusicales de Rennes.

Meanwhile, they signed on the indie label Cinq/7, and the song "On My Shoulders" was their first single, also used in an Oxford-notepads commercial.

The band's name is derived from the first note of the solfège scale, and is pronounced as the English word "dough", with a long "o" sound. It is written with the letter Ø (slashed o), and the "D" often in lower-case to resemble a half note.