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 recognized for spectacular dwell performances. Their aim: the kind of credible ascendance that places an act into the auteurs’ league—on huge levels, 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 underneath their shared Overmono moniker, the Russells had each the confirmed chops and essential patina of underground cool. Different parts 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 powerful visible id of dual, frolicking Dobermanns—playful, taut, and muscular, just like the music—splashed throughout file 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, offered gasoline for a prolonged, globe-trotting tour to cement their standing as a severe dwell 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 dwell setup they branded as “Pure Devotion.” Songs had been deconstructed and reconstructed every evening because the pair hunched over their blinking arrays. They packed out Glastonbury, Alexandra Palace, and Manchester’s Warehouse Venture; finally the query arose of tips on how to seize these serendipitous moments on file. Furthermore, why trouble, in a world during which you may 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 music 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 huge 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 luggage, 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 smooth focus, buying and selling in-your-face depth for intimacy.
“Lockup” lifts vocals from an obscure Birmingham post-punk monitor; its uncanny, piercing expression is at odds with the craving vocal samples, full of quiet drama, which have change 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 droop with “Mialon,” and, on “Barum,” a roving synth line that remembers the deft turns of Peverelist’s “Roll With the Punches” (a monitor 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 unfastened and bouncy, is the beat leaking by the lavatory stall to pull 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 .
