Again in 2020, Tom and Ed Russell set out within the footsteps of Daft Punk, the Chemical Brothers, Disclosure, and Bicep. After working for greater than a decade in membership music’s trenches, the brothers now aspired to be not merely DJs, however a dance-music act identified for spectacular reside performances. Their purpose: the type of credible ascendance that places an act into the auteurs’ league—on massive phases, on their very own phrases. No want for gaudy costumes or EDM cake-throwing gimmickry. With profitable solo careers carved on the coalface—as Truss and Tessela, respectively—and a brief string of ingenious membership movers below their shared Overmono moniker, the Russells had each the confirmed chops and essential patina of underground cool. Different elements fell into place: a neat backstory of rising up as self-described “nation rudeboys” raving to jungle and techno within the quarries and woodlands of rural Wales; a robust visible identification of dual, frolicking Dobermanns—playful, taut, and muscular, just like the music—splashed throughout document sleeves and LED screens at exhibits. Maybe most significantly, the brothers had an indeniable chemistry, each within the studio and bounding round racks of apparatus on stage.
Their club-tested 2023 debut album, Good Lies, supplied gasoline for a prolonged, globe-trotting tour to cement their standing as a critical reside act, simply as nightclubs and warehouses refilled after two years of lockdowns and clandestine COVID raves. This was music to be skilled within the flesh, brushing up in opposition to different our bodies. Music to make blokes really feel emotional. The pair gigged relentlessly and retooled a reside setup they branded as “Pure Devotion.” Songs have been deconstructed and reconstructed every evening because the pair hunched over their blinking arrays. They packed out Glastonbury, Alexandra Palace, and Manchester’s Warehouse Undertaking; ultimately the query arose of methods to seize these serendipitous moments on document. Furthermore, why hassle, in a world through which you possibly can merely add the entire jaunt to YouTube? For Overmono the reply got here in stepping off the grid: away from quantized sounds and strict build-and-release track constructions, and towards one thing looser, moodier, and extra evocative of the moments in between the euphoria.
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Whereas born on the street and within the massive rooms, a lot of Pure Devotion stems from retreats to small studios in Iceland and Spain, writing on a minimal setup of a few synths and an FX unit. The warehouse roof-raisers have discovered a house inside XL Recordings disco baggage, the place the brothers will periodically slide out warmth like final yr’s Excessive Distinction “If We Ever” flip, leaving house right here for experimentation, and one thing much less utilitarian. It’s dance music with a mushy focus, buying and selling in-your-face depth for intimacy.
“Lockup” lifts vocals from an obscure Birmingham post-punk observe; its uncanny, piercing expression is at odds with the craving vocal samples, filled with quiet drama, which have turn into a signature of the Overmono sound. The beat on “Slowmotion” builds like a church drummer hitting a groove. There’s smoking-area chat and keyboard noodling on “Adre,” a luxurious R&B couch stoop with “Mialon,” and, on “Barum,” a roving synth line that remembers the deft turns of Peverelist’s “Roll With the Punches” (a observe which itself helped usher in a extra esoteric, cerebral strand of UK dance music proper across the time that dubstep acts started eyeing up arenas). All of which isn’t to say that Pure Devotion is a laid-back listening expertise. “Ballad,” gorgeously free and bouncy, is the beat leaking by means of the lavatory stall to tug you again to flail on the dancefloor. Album nearer “After the Rain”—all heartbeat monitor bleeps and drawn-out vowels—is tailor-made to carry the tears and curtain down .
