From the London suburb of Surrey, the Lawrence brothers, a.k.a. Disclosure, are bringing their underground electronic sound to the mainstream. When Guy started partying at 18, he discovered his love for dance music and brought it home to share with his then-underage brother, Howard.
With drumming and playing guitar already under their belts, they studied music production in college and began collecting synthesizers and experimenting with electronic music on their instruments at home. After posting their experiments online in 2010, their inbox quickly filled up. People wanted in on the music they were making. Fast forward to 2013, and the “White Noise” producers are selling out venues worldwide and have a brand-new album.
Their sound can be described as a combination of house and UK garage with smooth R&B vocals. But contrary to what you may have heard from dance-music critics, Disclosure is not deep house. The British musicians recently sat down with MTV News to set it straight.
“Most of the stuff we do is just pop songs written in the production-style of house, not necessarily deep house,” Guy said, with Howard adding, “Deep house is like very simple, just straight 4/4 kicks, very simple drums, deep jazz chords, simple basslines, simple samples… and I love it. Deep house is like one of our favorite things to listen to, [we] like to collect a lot of deep house records. But there is no way that a song like ‘Latch‘ can be described as deep house.”
And then there are some critics who are saying Disclosure are playing a lead role in the revival of house (others say they’re already bringing an end to it). To which Howard responds, “This whole new movement is being called deep house and the house revival. It’s like house never went away for us anyway. If you go to anywhere in Germany or most of Europe, house has always been cool and still is. Yeah, I don’t know. It’s a bit strange.”
No matter what the genre, Disclosure said they wish their debut album, Settle, had a little more hip-hop.
“I’d say for the album, I’d love to have gotten a rapper on the album,” Howard said, “which is why we’ve got a song on there like ‘When A Fire Starts To Burn.’ We just couldn’t find a rapper in time, so we just did the best we could and downloaded a load of spoken-word stuff and cut it up to make it sound like rapping. But in the future, we’d definitely like to work with a rapper. I grew up listening to hip-hop, especially American hip-hop. Someone like obviously Kendrick, A$AP, Bishop Nehru, Joey Bada$$… maybe someone really old school like Q-Tip, or anyone from Tribe because they’re like my heroes, DJ Premier and Gang Starr, Guru. All of those would be amazing. But we’ll see.”
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