“The mix should represent where we’re at now,” Disclosure said of their DJ-Kicks mix in 2021. “And where we’re at now is clubby.” Two years since Guy and Howard Lawrence turned in that seamlessly blended selection of opalescent deep house and fleet-footed garage—a set notably free of the kinds of big, belting, attention-grabbing vocals that they built their reputation on—their attitude doesn’t appear to have changed. The brothers have spent the past 13 years zigzagging between insidery dance music and big-tent pop, with mixed results. Alchemy, their first release since the conclusion of their major-label contract, is clearly meant as a reboot, repositioning them as dance artists who happen to make hits, rather than chart aspirants dabbling in club tropes.
Though there are vocals here, the grooves come first: fast-paced, winkingly contemporary takes on house and garage where the kick drums flutter and the filters fizz. They’ve made the shift in focus an explicit selling point: Alchemy is billed as their first album with no features and no samples. That’s a pronouncement presumably meant to get the attention of dance scenesters who may have lost interest in Disclosure around the time they started working with people like Lorde and the Weeknd. It’s a gambit with some intrigue (even if, for many acts, announcing a dance album with no features would be like unveiling a fish with no bicycle). But, beyond the jockeying for scene cred, the main takeaway is that Alchemy is fresher and more fun than Disclosure have sounded in ages.
On 2020’s Ecstasy EP and again on 2021’s Never Enough, Disclosure briefly canted away from the vocal-heavy pop that had become their bread and butter, but Alchemy marks the first time in a long time that they’ve dedicated themselves so thoroughly to pure dance music. Where those EPs jumped between Afropop edits, disco samples, and garage throwbacks, the new LP is held together by a sleekly unified palette. Reflecting the speedy tempos currently in vogue across dance-music subcultures, the grooves trundle away at a rollicking clip; save for two brief, beatless interludes, nothing dips below 135 BPM, and a couple are much faster. The drum programming emphasizes a sense of forward motion driven by skipping syncopations and a slippery sense of swing. The opening “Looking for Love” draws on the rushing cadence of vintage speed garage. “Simply Won’t Do,” which plays a killer bassline off silky vocal chops, sounds like an updated Basement Jaxx with a little bit of French touch thrown in and the pitch fader glued to +8. “Higher Than Ever Before” is like a counterfactual thought experiment: What might a golden-age jungle remix of Tame Impala sound like? And “A Little Bit,” which closes out a strong four-track opening stretch, is an irresistibly syrupy, sentimental trance-house banger that sinks its hooks deeper with every twist of the chord progression.
