Back in 2020, Tom and Ed Russell set out in the footsteps of Daft Punk, the Chemical Brothers, Disclosure, and Bicep. After working for more than a decade in club music’s trenches, the brothers now aspired to be not merely DJs, but a dance-music act known for spectacular live performances. Their goal: the sort of credible ascendance that puts an act into the auteurs’ league—on big stages, on their own terms. No need for gaudy costumes or EDM cake-throwing gimmickry. With successful solo careers carved at the coalface—as Truss and Tessela, respectively—and a short string of inventive club movers under their shared Overmono moniker, the Russells had both the proven chops and crucial patina of underground cool. Other components fell into place: a neat backstory of growing up as self-described “country rudeboys” raving to jungle and techno in the quarries and woodlands of rural Wales; a strong visual identity of twin, frolicking Dobermanns—playful, taut, and muscular, like the music—splashed across record sleeves and LED screens at shows. Perhaps most importantly, the brothers had an indisputable chemistry, both in the studio and bounding around racks of equipment on stage.
Their club-tested 2023 debut album, Good Lies, provided fuel for a lengthy, globe-trotting tour to cement their status as a serious live act, just as nightclubs and warehouses refilled after two years of lockdowns and clandestine COVID raves. This was music to be experienced in the flesh, brushing up against other bodies. Music to make blokes feel emotional. The pair gigged relentlessly and retooled a live setup they branded as “Pure Devotion.” Songs were deconstructed and reconstructed each night as the pair hunched over their blinking arrays. They packed out Glastonbury, Alexandra Palace, and Manchester’s Warehouse Project; eventually the question arose of how to capture those serendipitous moments on record. Moreover, why bother, in a world in which you could simply upload the whole jaunt to YouTube? For Overmono the answer came in stepping off the grid: away from quantized sounds and strict build-and-release song structures, and toward something looser, moodier, and more evocative of the moments in between the euphoria.
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While born on the road and in the big rooms, much of Pure Devotion stems from retreats to small studios in Iceland and Spain, writing on a minimal setup of a couple of synths and an FX unit. The warehouse roof-raisers have found a home inside XL Recordings disco bags, where the brothers will periodically slide out heat like last year’s High Contrast “If We Ever” flip, leaving space here for experimentation, and something less utilitarian. It’s dance music with a soft focus, trading in-your-face intensity for intimacy.
“Lockup” lifts vocals from an obscure Birmingham post-punk track; its uncanny, piercing expression is at odds with the yearning vocal samples, packed with quiet drama, that have become 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 sumptuous R&B sofa slump with “Mialon,” and, on “Barum,” a roving synth line that recalls the deft turns of Peverelist’s “Roll With the Punches” (a track which itself helped usher in a more esoteric, cerebral strand of UK dance music right around the time that dubstep acts began eyeing up arenas). All of which is not to say that Pure Devotion is a laid-back listening experience. “Ballad,” gorgeously loose and bouncy, is the beat leaking through the bathroom stall to drag you back to flail on the dancefloor. Album closer “After the Rain”—all heartbeat monitor bleeps and drawn-out vowels—is tailored to bring the tears and curtain down all at once.
