The Russell brothers bridge the big-beat thrills and soaring emotions of their live shows with a more intimate, stripped-back, headphone-ready sound.
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.
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.
If Overmono can be accused of anything, it’s finding a formula that works and then hammering the last spark from it. In a live context, and with the limits imposed by a hardware-heavy setup, there’s more possibility that the process will throw out some startling mutation. But there’s always the risk that the variations become lifeless facsimiles. So it is with “Knight in Shining Prada,” a collaboration with poet John Joseph Holt that attempts to replicate the mournful paean and sweeping cathartic release of 2020’s For Those I Love remix (and, with Holt’s stiff, laddish delivery, something of the verve of 2024’s “Turn The Page” rework too). Unfortunately it gets nowhere close. In spite of its weighted lines reflecting on the death of Holt’s brother and a pulsating acid wig-out, it’s more self-parody than emotive punch in the gut.
There is also, of course, the question of what being a big, live dance-music act means in the collapsed cultural context of the mid-2020s. In some ways, capturing the mood of the club is the impossible task of every dance-music album. But in a post-Boiler Room era—in which the idea that clubbing is something that happens on camera, everywhere, all at once, has not only become commonplace but been subsumed into the new, endlessly clippable internet where all culture is condensed for the vertical video screen—the task feels more existential. Is it for real, or for the Reel? Overmono meet the moment with calm confidence. Pure Devotion reveals itself in the deft, delicate touches that speak to the intimate experience of dancing in a room surrounded by strangers: Kindora and Rock Floyd’s conversational swirl of words on “Ballad,” the pained, echoing vocal flourishes on “Even Angels Ghost,” the whitewash of synths on “Laxbrook.” In successfully bottling the feeling, it makes you feel like you were there—rather than scrolling clips on social media wishing that you were.
