“ENERGY” is the 3rd album by British electronic dance pop group, Disclosure, a duo of brothers named Howard and Guy Lawrence.  

 “ENERGY” is the group’s first project since their chart topping, Grammy nominated sophomore album, “Caracal”, which released in 2015.  

 “ENERGY” exists as an extremely bright, vivid, boisterous body of music in arguably one of the most arduous times because of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, they released the project anyways so that the “positive messages” could be shared, according to Disclosure.  

 “ENERGY” is an album with incredible color, buoyancy, and is incredibly textured. Just like any electronic and dance album, the focus is on layered production, driving and pulsating drums, and more air for the production to breathe by limiting vocals to more of a side role.   

 The first three tracks do start the album on a less than ideal note though. “Watch Your Step” has colorful and vibrant rifts, and while the production is constantly in motion and has this easy to follow drive. It is vocally vapid however with a really simple, but ultimately non-impactful chorus and the vocals sound muddied and compressed, it’s like painting with every detail right in the background but the foreground lacks focus and is not unpleasant, but you can see the potential it wastes.   

 That’s the same story for “Lavender”, featuring Channel Tres and “My High”, featuring Britin rapper slowthai and American rapper Amine. Both have incredibly varied and bouncy production that laps the vocals because they exhibit so much more color, energy, and overall care. It’s easy to understand that each one of these 3 are club bangers that you can throw on and they give the parties an exorbitant amount of vibrant colors, aggressive drums and booming easy to follow choruses, but the novelty doesn’t warrant repeat listens.  

 “Luckily, Who Knew” and “Doucha (Mali Mali)” have an inescapable groove and really give the album an exciting pulse with slick build ups and bridges, tone changing but rewarding African influences that give “ENERGY” a new sound to play with, and a kaleidoscope of color that envelopes the listener. One lofi inspired interlude in “Fractal (Interlude)” that deescalates the higher octane first part of this album and we arrive at the worst song on “ENERGY” by a mile.  

 “Ce n’est pas” is such a drag of a song. It is six minutes of the most vapid and uninspired beat, a repetitive and boring chorus with almost vapid vocals the whole time. It is a song without color in an album that boosts its huge catalog of enveloping and rewarding song that surround you in color and energy, pun intended.  

 The title track “ENERGY” completely reignites the anything “Ce n’est pas” does to harm the albums progress though. The title track uses booming tribal drums, an aggressively potent vocal sample and tons of production drops make this track have incredible movement and bounce. 

 After another lofi interlude “ENERGY” finally hits its stride with the airy and poppy “Birthday”. A song about questioning what to do with broken relationship but stays bright and expressive with objectively best vocal performance any lyrics on the album, its calming in the truest sense and the original track list ends on “Reveria”.  

 Another track that is more lowkey, cozy, and warm like” Birthday” but it has a verse from legendary rapper Common and ends the original track list on an upbeat, calm, but mostly gratifying feeling.  

 “ENERGY” starts out rocky, the first couple tracks are inoffensive but not as gratifying as the second half of the album. But songs like “ENERGY”, “My High”, and “Birthday” and other tracks are such visceral highs that a track like “Ce n’est pas” can’t bring it down. Overall Disclosures 3rd studio album ENERGY gets a 7/10.