BEST ALBUM: DISCLOSURE ‘SETTLE’
Disclosure smashed 2013 with their blend of garage, house and pop
Best of British Breakthrough Producers and Best Remix award winners last year, brothers Guy and Howard Lawrence have now bagged Best Album for their debut ‘Settle’.
“It means a lot,” says Guy about their latest DJ Mag win. “And the fact it’s a public vote as well, it’s great because it’s actual fans and people who listen to the music.”
It forms the deserved conclusion to a ridiculously busy and successful year.
“I’d say for at least 90% of it we’ve been constantly gigging all over the world and just making sure we get our music out to as many people as we possibly can,” says Howard.
An irresistible collision of UK garage and hook-laden pop music, ‘Settle’ hit No.1, has spawned four top 20 singles, was nominated for the Mercury Prize and is now also up for a Grammy award.
“Everything that we wanted to achieve is happening and has happened,” Guy explains. “It’s just great to see that people are connecting with our music so well. It’s a really proud feeling now we’ve come to the end of the year after all that madness happening!”
That madness also included selling out Brixton Academy twice over, playing across the festival circuit and managing to attain commercial success without losing their credibility.
“We wanted to incorporate that pop element in terms of the song structure and have a chorus as opposed to a drop,” says Howard about the album’s overall game-plan. “We wanted to mix that with the whole club music thing that we got into more recently, because we only discovered it about four years ago. We wanted to find a healthy balance and didn’t want to go too far down one of those routes, and I think we succeeded.”
At 22 and 19-years-old respectively, Guy and Howard have achieved a huge amount very early in their careers. So what does 2014 hold?
“To be honest we’re pretty much going to be doing what we did this year, just a bit less so we’ve got a bit more time for writing,” says Guy. “We still need to have that conversation about what we want to do musically next, but it’s just going to be more touring and a bit of writing.”
