Disclosure may have made their name as canny pop-dance hybridists on their debut album, but before that, Guy and Howard Lawrence cut their teeth on the house and garage tunes that had circulated in London clubs while they were still children. That classic, four-to-the-floor sound constitutes the essence of the duo’s DJ-Kicks mix. Most of the tracks in the set were released between 2019 and 2021, but their selections feel older, channelling the moody chords and silky disco samples of ’90s and 2000s house. (The UK group Slum Science’s hypnotic “Mezmerized”, from 2005, is one of the few relatively vintage cuts here, and it’s a wonderful discovery: a loopy, shuffling descent into tech-house that sounds simply timeless.) After a gentle, ambient opener from the Spanish producer Pépe, the Lawrence brothers dive into dreamy synths with Harry Wolfman’s “LOTF”, a new exclusive; hint at the French touch with the spangled synths of Cleanfield’s “Conflict With Clayton”; and then drop their own exclusive cut “Deep Sea”, a chiming, pulsing groove channelling warehouse-party-at-sunrise vibes. They keep up that blissed-out, heads-down intensity for the majority of the set, dialing up the intensity with the playful “Observer Effect”, another of their own cuts, before closing out with a gently ecstatic slice of ambient jungle from Arfa x Joe.
- Hayden James