And so a summer has passed without a single tent unwittingly erected next to an all-night soundsystem, a single wristband being slipped off and passed back, a single bottle of supermarket vodka decanted into a bottle of mineral water. This has been our first year without dance festivals or open nightclubs since the second summer of love (although there has been a surge of illegal lockdown raves). Even as aspects of normal life return, the one thing most Brits haven’t done since early 2020 is dance with one another.
So while it makes sense that Taylor Swift would release an album of folky introspection during this time, it seems almost perverse that Disclosure, whose whole rave-on d’être is to headline festivals in home counties woodland, or come on at 3am at an Ibiza superclub, would choose this moment to release their first album in five years.
“It does feel strange to make an album of club music when all the clubs are closed,” says Guy Lawrence, speaking over Zoom alongside younger brother Howard, from their studio in Guy’s basement. He’s got his hair neatly slicked and is surrounded by flashy production gear. “But after a few months of delaying we realised this was a perfect time to release an album called Energy which has a lot of positive messages about strength and courage. OK, we finished it in November so we didn’t make it intentionally for a pandemic, but it does work well.”
It is true that Energy’s title track – which samples a motivational speaker hollering, “Right now, you should feel invincible” – could easily be used in some kind of BBC clap-for-carers compilation. But the record also feels like a departure for a band who started out 10 years ago only planning to make a few UK garage productions and put them on Myspace.
I first interviewed the brothers for the Guardian in 2013 when Howard was still a teenager, Guy was yet to turn 22 and all their songs were made on one laptop, mostly using plug-ins they’d illegally downloaded. By that point they were already playing big headline shows, but still seemed in awe that Latch and White Noise, two songs they’d worked on above their parents’ auction house in Surrey, were riding high in the charts.
What was impressive about Disclosure in those early years was how they straddled every dance music faction: their songs could be heard in trendy deep house raves, student nightclubs and the changing rooms of Topman. Their debut album Settle embodied that have-your-cake-and-eat-it approach. It featured a bunch of middle-tier UK vocalists such as Sasha Keable, Eliza Doolittle and Jamie Woon – the kind of acts who might support Ed Sheeran for a UK tour. Yet the undeniable songwriting and fresh take on UK garage meant it was a critical success, nominated for a Mercury, Brit and Grammy.
Two years later they followed up with Caracal, which repeated many of the same tricks but this time with access to nicer gear and a higher calibre of international artists including the Weeknd, Lorde and Miguel. It went to No 1 in the UK and top 10 in the US. By 2016, just three years after their debut album, they were headlining the Other stage at Glastonbury and curating their own huge festival, Wild Life, on the East Sussex coast.
At the time of their debut, Howard in particular seemed weary of their new lifestyle. He’d only just decided he liked dance music and was still opposed to most of the trappings that came with it. “I don’t really like crowds,” he said then. “Loads of slobbering, drunk people isn’t that fun when you’re not drunk. I love the music in the clubs we play; I just don’t necessarily love the people.”
Both brothers laugh when I read this quote back to them now. “Well,” says Howard, “when you’re 15 and you go to a club, it’s a pretty terrifying place. I wanted to get to our shows as late as possible, get straight on stage and get the hell out. I felt really unwelcome, I was only there to work.” He has warmed to the club experience in the intervening years, but still has never done drugs. “I realise they are an important part of dance music, though – I did think about trying MDMA at one point, for research.”
While Howard still has mixed feelings about their lives as dance superstars, Guy relishes it. Even during lockdown, he’s been in LA with his girlfriend, working on the record and doing a Boiler Room set from his front room surrounded by potted plants. Howard, by contrast, took his money from the first record and bought a plot of land out in the Sussex countryside.
“When we came off tour five years ago I got my house, and planted, like, 1,000 trees and started growing food. I still buy flour and milk but a large amount of my food I grow myself. I get pleasure out of being out in nature and watching things grow. You grow a bit with them,” he says philosophically.
Howard is quiet when we’re talking about live shows, preferring to reflect on their career via reference to the works of Ernst Gosch, the father of syntropic agriculture, which he has been reading about in lockdown.
“Gosch says that everyone knows the important role bees play in pollinating the plants, but they don’t do that tactically to pollinate plants, they just do it because they want the nectar. All animals are the same. Lions can keep the populations of gazelles down, but they’re just thinking: ‘Ooh, bet I could eat that weak gazelle.’ I think in any aspect of life, you can do something for selfish reasons, but it ends up helping other people more than you would imagine.”
That divide, between the extroverted house head and the introverted naturalist, replicates itself in the studio. Guy spends hours obsessing over production and instrumentation, but it’s Howard who tends to give the songs their pop sensibilities, writing the chord sequences and lyrics. “When we started making music, Guy would make these really credible underground 2-step beats, and I’d come in and accidentally make it a hook. I’d fuck up his experimental underground thing and make it a hit,” says Howard, only half joking.
“You’d ruin it!” Guy retorts. “I’d be like: ‘Mate, I had this ready to be a Boiler Room smash!’”
“I’d be like: ‘Sorry Guy, I accidentally got it playlisted on Radio 1.’”
“It’s never a fight,” Guy assures me. “We saw the best results when we just fell into those roles.”
That way of working can be heard on Energy, an album that has overhauled the Disclosure gameplan. Gone are the Balearic bangers. Instead, the duo have used a familiar palette of sounds and applied it in unusual ways; rich textural production that encompasses deep house, R&B and bedroom pop. Beats don’t just loop round but lurch off in unexpected directions.
Also scrapped are the name collabs and Brit School singers – perhaps a response to muted reviews to their last album. They have brought in a series of vocalists and rappers, all of whom are themselves at the more boundary-pushing end of their respective fields: Slowthai, Kehlani, Cameroonian singer-songwriter Blick Bassy, the Internet’s Syd, Malian singer Fatoumata Diawara, rapper Mick Jenkins, and the odd legend such as Kelis or Common. It makes for a more varied record, where vocalists feel like genuine collaborators, and the songs are greater than the sum of their parts.
A lot has changed in dance since Disclosure first emerged: questions around privilege and profiteering have come to the fore. There was little mention in the press back then that Jungle, an act founded by two white men who went to private school in west London, kept their identities secret, instead using mostly black faces in their music videos. But now Diplo regularly has to answer questions about culturally appropriating dancehall culture and the dance act Housekeeping chose to delete all their social media after it emerged one of its members was a millionaire private landlord who has been linked to the gentrification of Brixton market.
So it is notable that on an album made by two white, home-counties men, every credited collaborator on the record is a person of colour. Singers perform in multiple languages and the n-word is littered throughout – their collaborators arguably lending Disclosure the credibility of their more diverse backgrounds. When I begin to raise this, Guy launches into an answer that you get the sense he knew he was going to have to give.
“What people need to know is when we’re choosing our features it’s never for diversity reasons. It’s always two questions: ‘Can you sing or rap?’ and ‘Are you a nice person?’” He says they’ve wanted to include rap, for example, in their music since the beginning, “but when you’re from Reigate in Surrey, there aren’t a lot of rappers. Once you get past album two, suddenly you can hit up rappers and they’ll actually respond to you. Artists like Kelis and Common will actually take our call.”
Guy is probably aware that many of the producers that came out around the same time as Disclosure – Secondcity, Duke Dumont – have been accused of not properly crediting the vocalists on their record. In those cases the producers were white men and the vocalists black women. Guy is adamant Disclosure would never make the same mistake. “I think a lot of the cultural appropriation talk comes from people not getting a fair share … if you credit the person, give them a good cut on the publishing, everybody’s happy.
“On our last album we sampled [veteran Sudanese artist] Kamal Keila on the song Where You Come From. We got an email from him last year that said: ‘Thanks for the royalties from that song, I’ve finally been able to fulfil my lifelong dream to buy and own a collection of rare exotic birds. You’ve made an old man very happy.’”
Assuming big questions about cultural ownership can be solved with the right publishing splits is perhaps naive, but then with 10 years at the coalface of an increasingly commercialised industry, Disclosure remain refreshingly uncynical. “I get to do exactly what I want every single day,” says Guy. “It’s not the meaning of life but we’ve managed to find great meaning in life. It’s not like we’re oil tycoons either; we’re putting something positive in the world. Just in the right place, at the right time, doing the right thing.”
Energy is out from Friday
