Image by Hollie Fernando
In mid-July, the UK reopened the country’s live music and festival industry after over a year of lockdown in the face of the pandemic. The aptly named “Freedom Day” was one eagerly anticipated by music fans and nightlife goers across the nation, and one which the Lawrence brothers seem to have been fixated on for some time. The DJ and producer duo, better known as Disclosure, have just released their latest EP Never Enough, which in the words of Guy Lawrence is sparked by the brothers asking, “What would we want to hear in those moments? What does that first moment back in a club sound like? What does walking into Shangri-La, Glasto at 2am feel like again? What does a headline show at Reading look like after all the difficulties 2020 brought on our industry?” Never Enough very much takes its cue from attempting to find these answers, looking to soundtrack the moments of magic and euphoria that can only be felt on a swarming dance floor where the masses move together.
Never Enough comes off the back of last year’s Energy. That album was a vast, sprawling collection of mostly middle-of-the-road club fare that continued Disclosure’s formula as the foremost makers of electronic-pop crossovers. It is a formula that began with 2013’s runaway hit Latch, featuring the vibrato of Sam Smith against their signature deep-house bass wobble and later perfected on 2015’s Caracal. But by the time Energy arrived last year, the world had changed shape and the dance-pop landscape that the album designed for the dance floor felt somewhat inaccessible, perhaps even trite. Never Enough is a course correction, and sitting with the weight of what the world needed to hear to restart the party sees Disclosure arrive at a sort of maximalism better suited to the zeitgeist. While almost every track on Energy featured a pop star, there are no shiny hooks or features to be seen here; just propulsive dance music that fuses Disclosure’s sultry deep house aesthetic with tropes from tech, house and UK garage. In this sense, it continues the stylistic direction proposed by Energy but refines it to focus on Disclosure themselves.
Never Enough finds the duo mostly occupied with non-domineering yet luscious melodies and vocal samples across five lascivious and groovy tunes crafted with the peak of the high in mind. The title track opens the set with a steady four-on-the-floor and modulating synth stabs before building itself around a shuddering robotised vocal sample. Layers of subtle breakbeats arrive through distorted progressions and add a breeziness to what is essentially a retro tinged tech-house banger formulated for the headline slot. Happening makes the most of a funky synth arpeggio which substitutes as a chorus sung by machinery, revealing how Disclosure’s dance floor wizardry is markedly more potent when allowed to boil sans the big name features and pop lyrics. To this effect, previously released single In My Arms is closest to Disclosure the pop stars with its repeated choral phrase and production which cedes power to the vocals in comparison to Never Enough’s other tracks. Another Level is straight up UK garage, with glassy breakbeats and clipped, pitched “yeah” samples. It’s their most vehement embrace of the style since Settle, and a welcome return for them to a form that they master particularly well. The 90’s touched Seduction closes the EP with breathy, scuzzy whispers and RnB harmonies against computerised strings and a louche funk-house beat.
Despite its variations from the familiar, the sound of Never Enough is unmistakably Disclosure. This is likely due in part to the strength of their signature moves; that particular timbre of a bass modulation that you can recognise as their own anywhere, distinctive and rarely replicated. More so, Never Enough feels like a return to form for the Lawrence brothers. It’s the sort of music that pulses with the spirit of Settle, the unapologetic synthesis of basement and underground club sounds with the parts of the Top 40 that add to their craft, but never dominate it.
Listen to Never Enough below.
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