The release of Disclosure‘s 2015 record Caracal saw the UK brothers elevated to yet another level of global success and attention. Continuing to play with sounds within the house/dance genre, as well as branching out into R&B and pop music with collaborations with diverse artists including The Weeknd, Lorde and Australian vocalist Jordan Rakei, Disclosure successfully built upon their wildly acclaimed Settle material and were able to further beef up their dynamic live shows as a result.
In Australia for the Falls Festival and some popular headline dates (including a sold out show at the Sydney Opera House this week), Guy and Howard Lawrence saw down with us at Mt. Duneed Estate to talk about their development as songwriters and musicians with the creation of Caracal, and the nature of their recent collaborations.
“Collaborating with new people each time makes it very exciting,” Howard says. “In terms of the writing process. I think another thing that really excited us for this record was that, because we do the live show as our main thing, we’re not DJs, we’re predominantly a live act, we’ve got the freedom to write at whatever tempo we want and in whatever style. I think that if you’re DJing, you have to write at a speed that you can DJ your stuff, whereas we’ve got the freedom to do whatever we want; we’ve written everything from R&B slow jams to hard house music. It’s been really fun to experiment with that and, in the same way, it’s been pretty fun to play.”
“It makes the show feel like you’re watching a band.” Guy says of the growth of the Disclosure live production. “When you go and watch a band or a live act, they don’t just play the same speed the whole show; they don’t just play the exact same song over and over again, there are peaks and troughs. that’s what we wanted to do with the album and it’s definitely transcended into the live show as well, because most of our favourite albums aren’t all one speed. I don’t really know whose are and in dance music, when we were doing Settle, we knew that we wanted to make just house and garage – that’s why it’s pretty much all around that speed. We’ve done that now and it’s nice to move on and really kind of establish ourselves as being like, we can do more than just house.
On their collaboration with Rakei, Guy mentions the importance and general presence of the internet and its ability to link up musicians all over the world in today’s music climate.
“My friend sent me a link to Jordan Rakei, who’s on “Masterpiece”, he came out here and lived here for a year and saw him singing in a bar or a venue. He sent us the EP or the Bandcamp [link] and we bought it and loved it and then it was just a tweet away. He came to London and there was the song! The internet and social media and everything is completely why we’re sitting here; it’s how we were found in the first place, it’s how we found labels. It all revolves around that nowadays.”
Watch the full video below!
—
Caracal is available now. Hit up www.disclosureofficial.com for more info on the act!
———-
