The Best House and Techno Tracks of 2021

What made Disclosure one of the most outstanding production duos of the twenty-tens? A pop-established amalgam of various forms, including house, garage, dubstep, and bass, coupled with powerful vocal collaborations. Simple enough, right? English siblings Guy and Howard Lawrence as Disclosure successfully emerged in commercial electronic dance music in a period when the genre was experiencing apathy. They readied themselves with a more profound understanding of underground dance music measuring back to the 1970s - the discotheque era. After their initial introduction to the world in 2010, the pair quickly began to develop incandescent, immaculately composed pop songs, beginning with the 2012 world-wide hit "Latch," featuring Sam Smith. The path progressed with the Grammy-nominated albums Settle and Caracal, issued in 2013 and 2015. These two works alone added AlunaGeorge, Eliza Doolittle, Mary J. Blige, and The Weekend to their circle. Disclosure then resumed in 2018 with an array of singles and in 2020 came out with Energy, their third album. Then a Disclosure first occurred in 2021, they released their first commercially issued mix, a submission into the DJ-Kicks series.

Guy and Howard Lawrence, siblings and children of musicians, consumed music throughout their childhood in Surrey, England. They were both skilled with multiple instruments as young kids and studied music at Reigate College. All while also educating themselves in the hip-hop and house music styles, as well as dubstep and bass, which at the time were some of the newest genre developments in the United Kingdom hardcore continuum. The pair, already informed with soul, funk, and disco music from their home environment, followed present underground club music all the way back to 1980s Chicago house and Detroit techno. They then related their knowledge of those two styles to 1990s U.K. garage, and applied their scores of ideas to a modern hybrid sound that evolved into a truly distinctive form of music. Disclosure’s early material was uploaded to MySpace in 2010 and quickly gained interest from the Moshi Moshi label, which would later release the dubstep-oriented tracks "Offline Dexterity" and "Street Light Chronicle". The Lawrences continued to settle into their sound through 2012, and at the end of that year released singles and EPs for Transparent, Make Mind, and Greco-Roman. The U.K. label, Greco-Roman, being the independent label that delivered The Face EP, the first Disclosure issue to feature real vocalists as opposed to treated vocal samples.

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Gray Area Editorial Team