Overmono established themselves as an essential new force in British dance music with their 2023 debut album Good Lies, a dazzlingly inventive record that joined the dots of UK club culture. But Welsh brothers Tom and Ed Russell, whose name is a play on the Monmouth suburb from which they hail, had no interest in sticking to a formula when it came to making the follow-up. Instead, where their first record came together on the road in between euphoric live sets, they wanted this one to be something purposely built up in the studio. “We set some fairly specific boundaries for ourselves,” Ed tells Apple Music. “It was lots of little things but in the main, using the physical space around us as much as possible, wherever possible. That informed a lot of how we approached recording the album. We figured out early on that we wanted to write most of the record and then produce it afterwards, more like how a band would write a record.” Deciding they wanted their equipment to home in on synths from the ’70s and ’80s (“basically an excuse to buy lots more synthesizers,” says Tom), they embarked on intense writing and recording sessions across a variety of studios, heading first to Northern Spain, then setting up shop in Iceland before hunkering down at their own studio in Bristol. The result is Pure Devotion, a record imbued with the heady euphoria of their live events of the same name but with a forward-thinking dynamism coursing through 11 songs that signpost where rave can go next. Let Tom and Ed guide you through it, track by track. “Lockup” Tom Russell: “We’d been reading quite a lot of books, specifically Rip It Up and Start Again [Simon Reynolds’ account of the post-punk era] and that was informing how we wanted to approach this record—some of the early-’80s post-punk bands would be quite carefree in how they’d approach recording stuff. We went on a bit of a deep dive on some post-punk stuff and the vocal of ‘What a Waste’ by Fast Relief jumped out at us. We wrote the basis of ‘Lockup’ pretty quickly in an afternoon and then parked it for quite a few months. Then, when we were at the studio in Northern Spain, we loaded it up. It was like, ‘Oh yeah, this is bang on the money.’ It was then a process of fleshing out the rest of the track and then a lot of producing on it when we got back to the studio in Bristol.” “Knight in Shining Prada” (with John Joseph Holt) Ed Russell: “This is with our dear friend John Joseph Holt. He sent over this incredible poem that he had written about his relationship with his late brother. We had these amazing words from John, and it took us almost a year to figure out exactly how we should support his poem. Again, it was in Northern Spain, we had this chord progression we loaded up one night that was something we’d been messing around with. Immediately, when we started playing it with John’s vocal, it felt like it was exactly the emotional support that we were looking for. We stayed up really late that night and went absolutely crazy on it. We ended up doing 84 versions of it, somehow. We went with version 83 in the end.” “Slowmotion” TR: “This is one of the tracks on the album that we’ve been working on versions of for a few years. It took a while to settle on exactly what we wanted to achieve with it and it was in Iceland that we managed to crack it. We loved the vocal and the chords, it was about making sure that we nailed the middle bit. We started processing a Roland SH-101 synth in quite extreme ways and managed to get it to sound like some sort of electric guitar. Once we started doing that, we were like, ‘Yeah, this is the vibe that we were after.’” “Even Angels Ghost” (with Kindora) ER: “[Tennessee singer-songwriter] Kindora is someone we’ve sampled on a lot of our previous music. She’s got an incredible voice and we love working with her. On this record, we really wanted to have a proper feature with her. It feels like the most complete version of anything that we’ve done with Kindora. It was amazing to finally be able to do something together that was a full feature.” “Barum” TR: “We’d recently got a Yamaha CS-15, which we bought in Japan, restored. We’d hit record and play about with stuff and park it for a while then come back to it. That formed the basis of ‘Barum.’ Then we were looking for a vocal for it and we found the Jaz Karis vocal, and it hit us straightaway. We spent a long time working on the drums, re-amping them in the studio and sending them through an old train station Tannoy speaker from the 1930s. We got it from our tech—it was in his shed, no idea where he got it from! It’s a Goodmans driver, and we contacted someone who’s worked at Goodmans for ages and he was like, ‘I’ve never seen one of these before.’ It’d be nice to find out some more about it.” “Mialon” ER: “We really wanted to write something that captured that feeling of driving around late at night on your own. We always talk about how music relates to the car, like ‘How does it feel if you’re driving around listening to this song?’ ‘Mialon’ was one that we were like, ‘Wow, this is a late-nighttime driving-around song.’” “Laxbrook” TR: “It’s a track we’ve been trying to crack for a long, long time. We’ve got so many different versions on our hard drive and we decided to have one last stab at it for this album. I wasn’t too confident. Over the course of two weeks, whenever I messaged Ed, I’d be like, ‘What are you up to?’ and he’d be like, ‘Oh, I’m just working on “Laxbrook.”’ This went on and on and on. I remember saying to my wife, ‘I think Ed’s having a bit of an episode, I’m a bit worried about him.’ When we finally got to the studio in Spain, he was like, ‘Do you want to hear this version of “Laxbrook”?’ And he’d absolutely nailed it. He managed to unlock it.” ER: “Sometimes, you’ve just got to sit with something for long enough to be able to make sense of it. It was just a long, drawn-out process of slowly turning over all the stones. You have to turn over every stone and realize there’s nothing underneath to find the one that does have the thing you’re looking for.” “Gem Lingo (ovr now)” (with Ruthven) ER: “We were getting obsessed with bands like Portishead and the way that they were approaching drums, taking very small sounds that don’t have a huge amount of life to them and processing them so much that you make them sound massive. That was what we were trying with this song. If you take the drums on their own, they’re really small clicks and pops that we recorded from the lockout groove on a center label of a record, we were then prioritizing the space between all of the hits more than we were the actual drum sounds themselves. That’s always informed the way that we make drums but ‘Gem Lingo…’ is the best example of that. Also, we were obsessed with guitar pedals. Every single layer on this song is recorded through five different pedals.” “Adre” TR: “‘Adre’ means to come home in Welsh. It’s got a sample of our mate Dwayne talking about swizzing us out of some money for playing at his 40th birthday at the start.” ER: “We had this sample of us chatting with our mates when we were back home that we really wanted to use somewhere on the record. We were trying to figure out what to do with it, and then once we had this voice note from one of us chatting with some of our mates, we were like, ‘We should just leave this song completely as it is, add the voice note and it doesn’t need to be any more than that.’” “Ballad” (with Kindora and Rock Floyd) TR: “We’ve used Kindora on so many tracks over the years and we’ve got to know her and her partner Rock. We loved the idea of having this track which featured them both and was a duet for those guys.” ER: “We wanted them to feel like, at times, they would be almost singing over each other, it feels like they’re fighting for space within the song, make them sound like they were both singing at each other. As the song goes on, they start fighting over each other a bit more—or singing together, depending on how you look at it.” “After the Rain” ER: “We knew we wanted to finish the record with a certain feeling and we had been trying to find that feeling. I don’t think either of us could necessarily describe what that was, we just knew in our minds what we were aiming for. ‘After the Rain’ became one of those songs that was pieced together from lots of other parts from other things. As with Kindora, [Norwegian electronic duo] Smerz are an act that we’ve sampled a fair few times. They’ve got an incredible topline ear, these really amazing vocal hooks with the most beautiful modulation in them. We combined the vocals from two different Smerz songs that we chopped up a lot. We both knew how we wanted the album to feel as it finished, and it was just a case of just trying and trying until we found the thing that gave us that feeling.”