Disclosure

There is a version of the Disclosure story where two brothers from Surrey get lucky with a single, ride the UK dance music wave for a few years, and quietly fade back into the landscape. That version did not happen. What actually happened is more interesting, and more instructive about what it takes to build something durable in electronic music.

Guy and Howard Lawrence grew up in Reigate with parents who were working musicians. Both started instruments young. Both ended up drawn to electronic production before either had a driver’s license. The thing that separated them early from their peers was not technical fluency but curatorial taste. They knew what they wanted to sound like before they knew how to make it sound that way, and the gap between intention and execution closed fast.

Latch, released in 2012 with Sam Smith on vocals, announced them in a way that almost no debut single does. It was not just a good song. It was a statement of approach: melodic but rooted in physical rhythm, emotionally direct without sacrificing structural sophistication. The resulting debut album Settle did not sound like a product of the UK dance scene’s tendency toward cool detachment. It sounded like it actually wanted you to feel something, and people responded accordingly.

Caracal followed in 2015 with a broader palette of collaborators and a slightly more polished surface, and then came the period of recalibration that most successful acts eventually hit. The brothers stepped back, worked on other things, and returned in 2020 with Energy, which felt like a correction toward rawness. The 2023 album Alchemy pushed further into that direction, with Howard Lawrence stepping more prominently into the role of vocalist and the duo leaning into longer, more patient structures.

Their live performances have always been a reliable indicator of what they are actually reaching for. Disclosure sets have never been content with simply pressing play on their catalog. They have consistently treated live shows as a different kind of statement, one that requires adaptation rather than recreation. That is a harder thing to sustain than it sounds, and they have sustained it across a career that now spans fifteen years.

The March 30 release of The Sun Comes Up Tremendous, their first new single of 2026, signals another shift. Howard is on lead vocals again, the production incorporates a full orchestra that Guy personally conducted, and the overall register is more introspective than anything they have released in some time. A spring North American tour follows, beginning April 7.

They are also still in their early thirties. Whatever version of Disclosure comes next has the advantage of everything they have built, and a career’s worth of proof that knowing what you want to sound like matters more than knowing what is currently working for everyone else.