If you were paying attention to dance music in 2013, Disclosure’s debut album, “Settle,” was impossible to ignore. It was a big seller with radio hits—it reached No. 1 in the U.K., topped the U.S. Dance/Electronic Albums chart, and even had a top 10 single in the States with “Latch,” most of the world’s introduction to the singer Sam Smith—and it came with a massive amount of press hype. Some of that was due to the youth of the English siblings behind the moniker—Howard Lawrence was just 19, Guy Lawrence was 22—and some of it had to do with how seamlessly the project combined several recent trends in electronic music to make an eminently listenable style. The Lawrence brothers grew up with the entire history of dance music just a few clicks away, and they had an intuitive understanding of how to integrate those sounds of the past with the pop-music present.

Source: Wall Street Journal August 24, 2020 21:13 UTC