Dance duo Dusky are to feature at The Warehouse Project on 30 September ahead of the release of their newest album Outer (14 October).
Responsible for some of the biggest UK house anthems in recent years (‘Careless’ and ‘Yoohoo’ among them), London duo Alfie Granger-Howell and Nick Harriman aka Dusky have announced the tracklist for their much anticipated artist album.
As DJs they have played everywhere from Berlin’s Panorama Bar and Ibiza’s DC10 to the biggest EDM festival stages in America, whilst their new audio-visual live show upholds a tradition established by great British dance duos The Chemical Brothers, Orbital and Leftfield.
In Outer, the duo have sought to distill the immediacy of their many dancefloor passions whilst “drawing on our wider influences and exploring sounds beyond our DJ sets”. Removed of restrictions, the album’s first single ‘Ingrid Is A Hybrid’ provided a window into these new experiments, but also sounded instantly Dusky. Blending cut-up vocal samples, vintage progressive house references and 90s rave motifs in a modern style, it was named an “instant classic” by Annie Mac and was a standout moment in recent live shows at London’s Field Day and Manchester’s Parklife.
“‘Ingrid Is A Hybrid’ fills one particular area on the album and it’s a big moment in both our live shows and DJ sets, but ‘Outer’ was meant as an exploration of many sounds, moods and influences,” explains Nick. “Our favourite albums always have that balance and a sense of journey that brings it all together as a cohesive body of work,” adds Alfie.
Always respected for wearing their influences proudly, Dusky have enlisted a tight, eye-catching collaborators list that includes godfather of grime Wiley on the ravey industrial techno surge ‘Sort It Out Sharon’ and synth/goth icon Gary Numan, who summons a classic performance on the new beat nodding ‘Swansea’. Elsewhere Decca’s Solomon Grey deliver a stirring vocal on the epic, bleepy, almost Underworld-esque ’Long Wait’, whilst Maribou State affiliate Pedestrian provides a heartfelt vocal on the elegiac pianos and shuffling breakbeats of downtempo closer ‘Spruce’.
“The one thing we wanted to avoid at all costs was having lots of features for features sake,” explain Nick. “Our vision for the collaborators was a really simple one,” adds Alfie, who himself sings on the blissed-out indie electronica of ‘Marble’. “Work with artists we respect and admire on tracks that genuinely demand that something extra to fulfil their potential – in each case here, there was something specific that we felt each particular collaborator could bring to the track in question.”
Dusky perform at Manchester’s Warehouse Project on 30 September.
