Pure Devotion

Most producers chasing an unusual texture reach for a plugin. Overmono put a cymbal in an oven.

It had been coated first, in coffee grounds, crisps and vinegar. That is one of several things the Welsh duo did to their equipment while making Pure Devotion, and it is the clearest statement of what the record was for.

Damage as a Working Method

Announcing the album in May, Tom and Ed Russell said they wanted it to carry the physicality of the studio itself rather than the smoothness of software. “We ran tape over magnets, blew up some speakers, and finally utilized that dirt-cheap, overclocked FX unit we snaffled years ago in Bromley,” the pair said. “We even oven-baked a cymbal covered in coffee grounds, crisps, and vinegar.”

What sounds like a novelty is a reasonable answer to a real problem. Software instruments are consistent by design, which is exactly what makes them hard to make strange. A ruined speaker distorts in a way nobody has modelled, and a cymbal that has been baked in vinegar rings differently from every other cymbal on earth, because there is only one of it.

The Bromley FX unit is the detail that gives the method away. Keeping a cheap, unreliable box for years and finally building a record around it is not gear fetishism; it is the opposite. The value is in the unpredictability, and unpredictability is the one thing an expensive, well-behaved instrument cannot supply.

Two Producers Who Started at Opposite Ends

The brothers did not arrive here from the same direction. Before Overmono, Tom produced hard techno as Truss and Ed made drum and bass and rave records as Tessela, including 2013’s “Hackney Parrot”. They played together briefly in 2012 as TR/ER, then began producing as a duo in 2015, and released their first EP, Arla, through XL Recordings in 2016.

Those two starting points are further apart than they look. Hard techno is built on repetition and pressure; drum and bass on rhythmic complexity and speed. Overmono’s records keep both instincts in play, which is why they can move between a locked four-to-the-floor pulse and broken breakbeat without either sounding like a guest appearance.

The separate careers were substantial in their own right rather than warm-ups. Tessela’s “Hackney Parrot” became one of the more widely played British club records of its year, and Truss had built a reputation in a techno scene that rewards severity over melody. Merging those two catalogues into a single project meant giving up two established names, which is a genuine cost and not one most producers accept.

They also run their own label. Ed founded Poly Kicks in 2013, and it has put out music by Joy Orbison and Special Request alongside the duo’s remix of For Those I Love’s “I Have a Love”. The name Overmono comes from Overmonnow, the part of Monmouth they grew up in, which is a fairly literal way of signalling that the project is a family concern first.

What Is Actually on the Record

Pure Devotion runs to eleven tracks and came out on 7 August through XL, three years after their debut Good Lies. Four guests appear across it: John Joseph Holt on “Knight in Shining Prada”, Kindora on “Even Angels Ghost” and again on “Ballad” alongside Rock Floyd, and Ruthven on “Gem Lingo (ovr now)”.

The rest — “Slowmotion”, “Barum”, “Mialon”, “Laxbrook”, “Adre”, “After the Rain” — carries no feature at all. For a duo whose profile has been rising through collaboration, that is a notably self-contained tracklist, and it fits an album whose selling point is the sound of its own making.

The lead single, “Lockup”, works from an unexpected source. It reshapes “What a Waste” by the Birmingham post-punk group Fast Relief into a driving four-on-the-floor club track — a post-punk record turned into dance music rather than the more familiar traffic in the other direction.

That choice of source says something about where the duo look for material. Fast Relief are not a canonical sample, and rebuilding a guitar band’s song as a club track requires stripping out most of what made it work in the first place. The gamble is that the remaining fragment carries enough character to survive being put on a four-to-the-floor grid.

The guest list is unusual for a similar reason. Ruthven, Kindora, Rock Floyd and John Joseph Holt are not names chosen to move an album up a chart, and four features across eleven tracks is restrained by the standards of a duo who have recently shared singles with Fred Again.. and Lil Yachty. Overmono have also released through AD 93 alongside XL, and the record keeps the smaller-label instincts of that side of their catalogue.

Three Years Spent Getting Louder

The gap since Good Lies was not idle. Overmono spent it sharpening the live act: a world tour, a Boiler Room set recorded in Manchester, and a Glastonbury performance. They had already been named UK’s Best Live Act at DJ Mag’s Best of British awards in 2021, before the debut album existed.

They stayed visible on record, too. In 2024 they remixed the Streets’ “Turn the Page” and worked with Fred Again.. and Lil Yachty on the single “Stayinit”. Pitchfork placed “Good Lies” at number 80 on its 100 best songs of 2023.

That is a lot of momentum to carry into a second album, and it usually pushes an act toward the safer, bigger-sounding record. Choosing instead to build one around broken equipment is a deliberate turn away from that pressure.

Why Ruined Gear Sounds Like Something

There is a long precedent for this in dance music, even if the cymbal is a new variation. The genre’s defining sounds have almost all come from equipment being used incorrectly: the Roland TB-303 was built to imitate a bass guitar and failed, and acid house came out of the failure.

What the Russells are doing is that principle applied by hand. Rather than misusing a machine’s controls, they are altering the machine physically — heat, magnetism, overload — so the thing producing the sound is materially different from the one the manufacturer shipped.

The trade-off is that none of it is repeatable. Bake a second cymbal and it will not match the first, which means the record cannot be reproduced exactly even by the people who made it. For an album about physicality, that is arguably the point rather than a flaw. Our piece on how the loudness war quietly ended covers the opposite instinct, an industry spending two decades making records behave.

A Second Album That Refuses the Obvious Route

The conventional second album after a well-received debut consolidates: bigger features, cleaner production, a song built to be played at the largest possible stage. Pure Devotion has four guests, most of them from outside the obvious pool, and a sound palette assembled from things the duo damaged themselves.

It is a bet that the audience Overmono built through touring came for the texture rather than the polish. Given that the live show is what earned them the award before they had an album at all, that looks like a reasonable read of their own crowd.

Pure Devotion is out now on XL Recordings.