Disclosure

English

2020 marks a decade since Disclosure’s first single, Offline Dexterity. Guy is still only 29 and Howard just 26 yet they have clocked up 4.5 billion streams, 4.5 million album sales and sold 500k tickets to headline shows (excluding festival appearances). When they started, they were performing in clubs that Howard would otherwise have been too young to enter. Their youth and naivete was key to their originality.
As the sons of professional musicians in Reigate, Surrey, Guy and Howard were players and songwriters long before they learned to DJ or produce, so they never felt compelled to fit in.

Caracal, their second number-one album and a Grammy nominee, was more ambitious, featuring the likes of Lorde (with whom they’d performed a White Noise/Royals mash-up at the previous year’s Brit Awards), Miguel, Gregory Porter and The Weeknd. The subsequent tour took them places they had never anticipated.
In 2018, they got back to work. Howard developed his songwriting and playing while Guy honed his production skills on hundreds of sample-based club tracks, five of which appeared on the Moonlight EP that summer.

There new album, ENERGY is out on August 28th. Every song on ENERGY was written from scratch in the studio, in either London or Los Angeles.
ENERGY is also the first time Disclosure have worked with artists who sing in other languages: Mali’s Fatoumata Diawara (Mali Mali) and Cameroon’s Blick Bassy (Ce N’est Pa), who jumbles up French with his own invented dialect. The basic track was recorded in one take, with Guy manipulating the 808 drum machine, Howard on bass and Bassy improvising. “That sums up the album for me,” says Guy. “It’s not even a real language but all the tone and flow is there.”

ENERGY’s commitment to immediacy doesn’t mean it lacks variety. Birthday, with Kehlani and Syd, is a yearning R&B slow jam, while Thinking ‘Bout You is a deliciously woozy re-edit of Lady’s 1976 soul single You’re Still the One. But as the sessions progressed, the music got harder and faster. The first offering from the record and, aptly the title track, pits a raucous rhythm from an album of Brazilian library music against a sample of Eric Thomas, the same hip hop preacher whose words memorably appeared on 2013’s When a Fire Starts to Burn. Thomas gives the album a kind of manifesto: “Look! Where your focus goes, your energy flows. Are you hearing me?”