Overmono spent part of making Pure Devotion trying to break their own equipment. Tom and Ed Russell pushed two synthesizers and an effects unit past what they were built to do until things started malfunctioning on purpose, and at one point recorded through a train station announcement system built in the 1930s. Almost none of that specific chaos is audible in the finished record.
The Welsh brothers wrote their second album during trips to Spain and Iceland, then pieced it together at their home studio in Bristol. It follows 2023’s Good Lies, the record that turned a well-regarded UK dance act into festival headliners, and Pure Devotion sticks close to the formula that did that: big, simple hooks, vocal samples chopped down to a single repeated phrase, drops built for a crowd rather than headphones.
Opener ‘Lockup’ samples an obscure Birmingham punk track, Fast Relief’s ‘What a Waste’, and turns it into something close to a 2026 update of Mr Oizo’s ‘Flat Beat’: one blunt, distorted hook, repeated at volume until it stops sounding like a joke and starts sounding like a threat.
‘Knight In Shining Prada’ is the one track that earns the word experimental. Poet John Joseph Holt delivers a spoken word piece dedicated to his brother Thomas, who died by suicide, over a bed that stays nearly silent until a hard-panned 303 acid line detonates underneath it with almost no warning: We’ve got unfinished business to attend to. The shift is genuinely disorienting, in a way most of the record never risks being.
‘After The Rain’ does something quieter but just as specific, splicing lines lifted from two different Smerz songs until they read as one new sentence, laid over a beat that finally sounds unhurried rather than engineered to fill a field.
The exception that proves the rule is ‘Gem Lingo (ovr now)’, built around clicky, tightly wound percussion and a layer of distortion that actually sounds like something pushed past its limits. It’s the one moment where the deliberately broken gear shows up in the actual sound rather than just the press notes, and it’s also, not coincidentally, the track that sounds least like anything else here.
That’s the record’s real gap. A band who clearly went looking for chaos in the studio came back out with one song that sounds like they found it, and ten more that sound like the version of Overmono that already sells out arenas. Pure Devotion is very good at sounding like Overmono. It’s rarely interested in sounding like anything else.
