When you ask the Disclosure brothers about the most surreal experience from the last couple of years, they pause for a few moments to consider the list.
“Seeing Sam Smith win four Grammys was extraordinary,” says Howard Lawrence, the younger of the two siblings.
"Having Nile Rodgers sitting next to me with his guitar and getting to say 'Nile, can you play me Thinking of You by Sister Sledge?' and him going 'sure'," says a grinning Guy Lawrence.
And then there was the arrival to their manor of soul music royalty in the shape of Mary J Blige. “She came all the way from America to us,” says Howard with a touch of wonder. “She could work with anyone she wants and she chose us.”
“What we love about Mary and why we worked with her more than once was because she becomes one of us in the studio,” adds Guy. “Sure, she’s Mary J Blige and that’s impressive, but in the studio there’s no ego. She’s not bad-ass; she’s lovely and calm and gentle, almost motherly. She wants to write music with the best people out there, and she thinks that’s us.”
Blige is not the only one with time and respect for the Lawrence brothers. Since the release of their 2013 debut album (Settle), Disclosure have become one of the biggest acts around. Whether it's their music pumping from your radio or the duo headlining a festival near you, Disclosure is the name up in lights.
It’s fair to say that others have followed their lead when it comes to blending house music and pop hooks.
“The most amazing thing has been the humongous shift of what gets played on radio,” says Guy. “I remember in 2012 if you heard house music on a radio in a shop or car, it was usually us because it really was only us at the time. We were only the house music you’d hear on the radio when it was all dubstep. Now, house music is the only thing that gets played and it’s never us,” he says, laughing.
He reckon the band were lucky regarding the timing of their breakthrough. “There were a few albums that were released a bit too early that could have done it. TEED’s album, for instance, was great, but if he’d released it the same year as us, people would have been more ready for it. The same with SBTRKT’s first album – it could have sold double if it had been later. We were the lucky ones.”
Starry starry voices
Disclosure's new one, Caracal, is a chop off the old block but with lots of added wow factor. There's a starry list of collaborators, including Lorde, The Weeknd, Sam Smith, Gregory Porter and Miguel, yet the sound coming from those grooves and bangers is distinctively Disclosure.
"I'd like to think we have matured," says Guy. "We're older than we were when we did Settle and I always think your album should be a reflection of how good you are at a time. Settle was how good we were then and Caracal is how good we are now – and, hopefully, we have progressed."
One of their aims was to diversify the sound. “We don’t just want to be known as a pop-house act,” says Howard. “We do more than that. We’ve taken the warm pads and the garage influences and house drums and spread them across a variety of tempos and speeds, and that’s now the Disclosure sound.”
Guy says the guest vocalists ensured a different vibe to that sound. “When you are working with so many different singers, you don’t have to change your sound all that much because they do that.
“You have a new voice every track, which changes the vibe completely. The only way to make the album cohesive when you have that kind of change song to song is to keep the sound underneath cohesive.”
All of the vocalists came to London to work with the brothers and their songwriting partner, Jimmy Napes.
“If you want to work with us, you’ve got to come to the studio,” says Guy. “And if you want to be on a Disclosure song, you have to write it with us. That’s how it works best, I think. The whole process of sending songs to people doesn’t work for us because you don’t get to meet them then. It’s terrible. You lose the soul of the music.”
They cite Lorde, who appears on Magnets, as a singer who is part of the process from start to finish.
Lorde above
“She’s the best example on the album of an equal collaboration,” says Guy. “With a lot of the people, we’ll take the lead in terms of the actual music and they’ll only do the vocals. With Lorde, she was involved in everything. She flew over, came to the studio, sat around on the piano and we came up with some chords. She was asking us to do things like drop the drums out in one part. We thought the song was done, but she had other ideas.”
Howard wanted Gregory Porter on board for Holding On. "Gregory is a big deal in jazz and I listen to a lot of jazz. We met him at the Grammys when he won jazz album of the year, and we got in touch afterwards.
"There's a lot of sampling in house music – pretty much every a capella has been ripped to fuck at this stage. So our managers suggested that we write a soul song with a soul singer and then remix it ourselves. We wrote a really slow piano ballad with Gregory, which was Holding On, and then the two of us took the a cappella and made it into what it is now."
It’s clear that the Lawrences have had few problems dealing with their success.
“How you deal with success depends on how you were brought up and who’s around you and if you’ve your head screwed on,” says Guy. “With us, we’ve got good parents who are also musicians and we’re sensible. Sure, we splurged a bit, but you meet some people and you know they’re going to burn out very quickly.
“I know it’s a cliche, but we’re not in it to make money. We want to do this for a long time. We’re happy that we can do this for a living, but we just want to make music and we’d be doing this if we had to work another job at the same time. We’re an album act, we’re a live act and we want to have a 10-year career . . . ”
“ . . . at least,” adds Howard.
Why not? In 10 years, Howard will be only 31 and his brother only 34. Sure, they’ll just be getting started.
Caracal is out next week
