Hot Press Meets Disclosure

A confident collection of impossibly cool crowd-pleasers, Disclosure’s debut album Settle has brought up lots of questions about the future of mainstream music, the credibility of pop and the marketability of deep house, all of which Guy Lawrence is blissfully ignoring.

He is, after all, a 22-year-old lad in Ibiza, and he does, after all, have a UK Number One album to celebrate.
“We’re winding down a little bit now,” he laughs, from the notorious party island. “We’ve got a show here on Sunday. Until then we’re just chilling, like absolute chilling.”
While we’re on the subject of the aforementioned Number One; how does it feel to be a hit?
“It’s great,” he gushes. “It’s obviously something we can be proud of for the rest of our lives. We can tell our grandchildren, ‘When I was 21 and 19, I made a number one album!’, that’s one of those things that you can keep forever. But it’s more that I just feel really proud because it’s the album that it is. It’s that kind of music that no-one expected to get back in the charts and we’ve done it and it’s absolutely amazing! It’s a real moment for the whole team.”
Having received unyielding praise for star-studded singles ‘Latch’ Feat. Sam Smith, ‘White Noise’ Feat. AlunaGeorge and ‘You And Me’ Feat. Eliza Doolittle, Guy and brother Howard had their first taste of the downside of fame last month, when they were forced to mime during a Capital FM show at Wembley Stadium. The result was akin to an electronic version of Nirvana’s infamous Top Of The Pops performance in 1991, with the unimpressed duo making it hilariously clear that they weren’t doing a damn thing on stage.
“That’s kind of what we were going for!” Guy explains. “I’ve actually got a video on my phone which I’m not really allowed to put up because it would be so bad if did, but it’s a video of us soundchecking and Eliza’s singing and me and Howard are behind the mixer and I’ve just got all the knobs and faders fully turned down. I’ve got all the cables unplugged and I’m throwing the cables everywhere and I’m filming myself going, ‘Fuck you Wembley!’
‘We knew from the start that we were going to get caught so we were like, ‘Right, we better embrace it!’ Massive respect to Nirvana and I think Muse have done it as well, where you mime and you just mime so badly that everyone can see it. I’ve not seen a single DJ do that, like, ever. I’ve only seen them fake it. I said, ‘It’s gone too far now, we’re going to have to play this show,’ and everyone has to do stuff that they don’t want to do, so we were like, ‘Let’s just be the first people to embrace it and to be honest.’”
As for all those love-struck critics and tastemakers debating the significance of a deep house/pop crossover album hitting the top spot, Guy says he’s more than happy to leave them to it.
“I don’t really read any of that crap, I think it’s a bit of a waste of time,” he says. “That’s why the album’s called Settle, because everyone’s given it so much hype, talking about us and saying, ‘They’re underground going mainstream,’ or ‘No, they’re not! They’re just mainstream and they’ve sold-out!’ The whole reason it’s called Settle is so that everyone just shuts up and listens to the music for what it is!”

Settle is out now on Island Records. Disclosure play Electric Picnic, which takes place from August 30 to September 1.