Overmono
Pure Devotion
XL
The best way of understanding Overmono is through the old cliché that musicians like to use when describing new releases: they make greatest hits albums of their newest material. Yet in the case of the Wales-born, London-based brother duo, these new hits are not Frankensteined together from their own back catalog, but from the long history of UK rave culture. From the late 1980s until the early 2010s, the UK produced a remarkable lineage of new electronic music genres: jungle, trip-hop, IDM, grime, dubstep, hyperpop, and more.
But at some point over the past decade, this production of new styles started to get a bit blurry. Today the staples of house, techno, garage, and drum ’n’ bass dominate UK rave culture rather than any startlingly new sound born in the 2020s. Without getting into the myriad sociocultural reasons for why this progression has slowed, it’s safe to say that the rate at which UK nightclubs are closing is certainly either a cause or effect (probably both). As such, things are in a bit of a stasis—not strictly looking backward, but also unable to create striking new sounds that become a major part of the culture.
Pure Devotion is an encapsulation of this very-contemporary, immaculately produced fusion of familiar approaches, one that’s imbued with a sense of equally familiar emotional weight. The increasingly diverse dance music scene seems to have become more emotionally open in recent years across the globe (South American producers like Ela Minus and Sofia Kourtesis are great examples), but also visible in major contemporary British names like Kelly Lee Owens, Four Tet, Barry Can’t Swim, Nia Archives, and Jon Hopkins. The emotion felt across the duo’s second album frequently manifests as Burial-aping melancholy, as heard on the crackled two-step rhythms of “Gem Lingo (Ovr Now),” or the fractured garage vocals of “Even Angels Ghost”—a title that even feels like Burial pastiche.
In terms of its technical construction, Pure Devotion is a barn-storming demonstration of Overmono’s skills at fusing different strands of rave culture together, often to potent effect. “Mialon” is a resonant, poignant amalgamation of dubstep rhythms and bass with contemporary pop-R&B vocals, while hard-hitting opener “Lockup” sits somewhere in the middle of pummelling techno and French house. Closer “After the Rain” is an elegant, comparatively relaxed take on old-school hardcore, its chest-caving low end balanced out by gorgeous synths and layers of soulful vocal samples.
While these genre-blurring experiments never tip over into anything that feels particularly bold or new, what makes them work is their straight-to-the-heart emotional language. It’s a blunt-force attack, but these 11 tracks consistently tap into a deep well of feeling. Regardless of stylistic innovations, maybe this is what dance music—going right to its core, eternal goal of transcendence—is all about.
