In the seven years since UK electronic music duo Overmono broke onto the scene, the brothers Tom and Ed Russell have, rather quickly, set the standard for the bass and breaks revival that they entered into. From the offset, their style and approach to production was distinct – minimal conglomerations of rave’s most essential elements, pulling from UKG, jungle, and frigid two-step. Executed cleanly and with laser precision, their bulbous basslines, metallic breakbeats, and vaporous vocal samples sounded like the natural progression for a scene that within the past decade, had produced both Aphex Twin and Burial. While their first three EPs, Arla I – III, postured Overmono as the future of UK underground (see: 16 Steps), it’s in the three years after that the Russell brothers would establish the true scope of Overmono. Their flirtations with Joy Orbison introduced robust four on the floors to their toolkit, a gateway drug toward their eventual assimilation of pop signifiers into their sound. Things became a touch softer, more cyclical and less abrasive, but maintained the grittiness of Overmono’s roots and early influences. Everything culminated in 2021 with their current signature song, So U Kno. With its hypnotic vocal loops and submerged bass, the gentle but propulsive banger became the global anthem of a dancefloor waking itself from hibernation. So U Kno was the most definitive evolution of Overmono at that point, an amalgamation of their underground roots with newfound pop sensibilities. It heralded the direction the Russell brothers would ultimately take, leading them to remixing Ed Sheeran, but most significantly, their debut album, Good Lies.
It’s perhaps no surprise that Good Lies is rooted in the So U Kno formula, the song itself sitting at the penultimate spot on the tracklist. The title track brightens this formula, full of shimmery flourishes with everything glossy and upward facing. Skulled is a chthonic variation, reverberating from beneath layers of earth, Is U is mercurial and serpentine with a barely recognisable Tirzah, and Calling Out stretches into a vacuum backwards as it freefalls through space-time. This is not to suggest that these are all the same song, but rather the results of a recipe that is unmistakably Overmono. Though the notion of anything ‘formulaic’ may be at odds with the sort of dance music paeans they would prefer to align themselves with, this is not a bad thing. In their case, the captivating yet aloof intertwining of icy breaks, heavy UKG bass, and vaguely familiar vocal samples is a winner, and Overmono come up with enough variations on the recipe to not feel reductive.
Download and stream Good Lies here
Good Lies isn’t all looped breakbeats and spherical bass, though. The Russell brothers have balanced experimentation with machine precision, and they make room on Good Lies for follies into genres that are both new to their oeuvre, and for new explorations into their early aesthetic. Cold Blooded and Calon introduce Afro-Caribbean rhythms to the Overmono palette, the former an afrobeat R&B jam while the latter looks toward amapiano and reggaeton. These genres are transposed in their style, though, which maintains a cool and calculated distance. Cold Blooded is what happens when you pressurise a Kelela in a syphon, while Calon keeps key elements washed out and indistinct, so that they wrap around the beats in support rather than take the lead. The subdued minimal electronica of Vermonly and Arla Fearn callback to their earliest releases, and in doing so emphasise Overmono’s remarkable growth. Tricks that would have come across as a faithful odes to Burial in 2016 sound unmistakably Overmono on Vermonly, while the choice to keep Arla Fearn’s most sparse moments alive with a sometimes throbbing, sometimes feint, break pattern shows how much the Russell brothers have grown into their style. By the time So U Kno (still potent as ever) rolls around, Good Lies feels like a retrospective of Overmono’s career and aesthetic choices, remixed to reveal their future direction.
The formulaic nature of Good Lies’ heavy hitters and Overmono’s exploration of styles currently prominent in pop makes this not only some of their most impressive, but their most accessible work to date, suggesting that Overmono have indeed cast their sights on mainstream appeal. With the breakout success of acts like PinkPantheress and songs like Charli XCX’s Beg For You taking the sound of the UK underground into mainstream pop, it makes sense that Overmono have taken notice, and poised themselves for crossover glory. Good Lies is both a tribute to their roots, and a statement of their current bigtime ambitions.
Listen to Calon from Good Lies below
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