The Overmono Pure Devotion album is real, it is coming, and the process behind it sounds like the most gloriously unhinged studio session the Russell brothers have ever documented. Tom and Ed, the pair who quietly became two of the most important figures in contemporary UK electronic music, have announced the record and shared the first track, ‘Lockup’, giving the underground its first proper listen to where their heads are at right now.
If you were hoping for a clean, polished digital production suite story, look elsewhere. The brothers described a making-of that reads more like a field recording experiment gone feral than a conventional studio session. They ran tape over magnets. They blew up speakers. They finally broke out a dirt cheap overclocked effects unit they had apparently been sitting on since picking it up years ago in Bromley. The detail that lands hardest, though, is this: they oven baked a cymbal covered in coffee grounds, crisps, and vinegar. That is not a metaphor. That is a cymbal, an oven, and a bizarre seasoning choice deployed in the name of sound design.
This approach is entirely consistent with how Overmono have always worked. The Tom and Ed Russell electronic music project has never been about replicating what works on a bigger scale. Their sound lives in the cracks, in the slightly wrong frequencies and the textures that feel like they came from somewhere physically real rather than a plugin library. ‘Lockup’ carries that DNA forward, and anyone who has spent time with their back catalogue will hear exactly where this new material sits in the lineage.
The Overmono Lockup track functions as a statement of intent rather than a crowd-pleasing single. It is the kind of opener that tells the room something has shifted without spelling out what. For a duo who built a reputation across the underground before breaking into far wider consciousness, that restraint is the whole point. Pure Devotion suggests they have no interest in chasing the moment they caught.
Dates and wider release details around the Overmono new album 2025 rollout are expected to follow. For now, ‘Lockup’ is out and worth your time in a proper listening environment, not a phone speaker, not background noise. These are records built for actual ears.
