It’s always after midnight in The Juan MacLean’s world. Cobbling together bits of house, disco and the punkier end of club culture, their music offers an idealised view of nightlife, writ large—decades’ worth of dance floors rolled up into a single potent package. The beats are even more powerful on The Brighter the Light, which gathers six years of the duo’s singles, yielding an hour of the kind of smouldering grooves that typically greet the dawn in warehouses from Brooklyn to Berlin. The ’80s influence so integral to their music remains pronounced on “What Do You Feel Free About?” and “Zone Non Linear”, which invoke the glory days of Jellybean Benitez B-sides. They also flirt with dub techno on “Quiet Magician”, while “Can You Ever Really Know Somebody” (featuring one of frontwoman Nancy Whang’s standout performances on the record) summons the iridescent textures of Luomo’s Vocalcity, which helped kick off the deep-house revival of 2000. The title track, an instrumental, closes the LP with some of the deepest grooves in TJM’s catalog—moody piano house touched up with a silvery hint of acid, suggesting the first rays of sunlight peeking through basement windows.