Overmono Is Transcending the Underground

After a decade of making music as Overmono, brothers Tom and Ed Russell may have struck dance music renown, but after those long nights (and early mornings) spent playing raves, they still prefer a quieter way of life. In 2023, the DJ duo of Tom and Ed Russell made their Coachella debut and a month later, they released their seemingly long overdue debut album, Good Lies. A US and Europe-traversing tour followed, along with a Boiler Room set performed as part of Manchester’s cult-favorite club series, The Warehouse Project.

As each rave wraps, Tom heads back to Devon – a seaside county about two hours from Bath – while Ed retreats to Bristol. The brothers were both living in London, their apartments just minutes away, when Overmono was born in 2015. Tom, who is 10 years Ed’s senior, bought a pair of turntables as a teenager, with his younger brother listening in through the wall. Inspired, Ed got his own pair as a young child and began experimenting with records stolen from his older brother’s room. Tom eventually moved from small-town Monmouth to London, where he released hard techno under the stage name Truss. Ed naturally followed in his footsteps, making bass-heavy rave tracks as the act Tessela.

Beyond a mere fusion of the brothers’ respective genres, Overmono has established a wholly new sound within the electronica sphere. While the duo has a knack for drawing from decades-old techno and hardcore, with songs dabbled with low bass, trance and breaks, one of their true talents lies in subtle experimentation. An Overmono track can be an emotional rollercoaster: one second is pensive and intimate, the next is euphoric. They opt for samples but, whereas some artists risk being formulaic when not recording original vocals, Overmono’s manipulation samples are always unexpected, for instance, converging a garage beat with high-pitched pop-style vocals.

“We’re both really particular about how things sound and the sonics of stuff,” Tom describes the process. “Being on the same wavelength when it comes to that, like, we both know exactly what we want. Like, we’ll know the destination and we just have to figure out how to get there.”

In 2012, Tom and Ed casually played a few live shows together as TR/ER without ever formally releasing songs under the namesake. Overmono took form a few years later, gradually and fluidly. The brothers convened in 2015 for a few sessions of making music together, underlined by the logic that if it sounds bad, noone has to know. After about four days, they were surprised by the sheer cohesiveness of their styles. Overmono’s debut EP, Arla, was released the following year.

Rob Jones

Throughout the years, their process has remained just about as fluid as their first handful of sessions. Oftentimes, they’re working on the same tune from their separate home studios, though they say Tom leads the charge on writing music and Ed favors beat-making. Every so often, they’ll convene for “quite short, but really intense writing sessions.”

“We’ll just be in a studio for four or five days and we’ll stay up all day and night and just write and write and write,” Ed says. “And then that, we take stock and figure out what we’ve got.”

There’s no pattern or sense of pressure for Overmono to release music. Like many electronic acts, their primary focus is on performing live sets, whether at a club or a festival. Although tracks played at their shows occasionally make it to Spotify, the brothers are making music with the intent to perform it live rather than for the song to be streamed digitally. It’s perhaps among the reasons Overmono didn’t put out an album until last year.

Jerry Dobson

Despite having a fluid approach to working with one another, Overmono exercises a careful curation over what songs they deem worthy of releasing digitally. Tracks are routinely receiving last minute tweaks from Ed, who calls himself a “megalomaniac in the studio.”

“It’ll be a day before the record is about to be mastered and I’ll be like, “I think we should redo the beat on this or I reckon we can get the drum sound better. For someone else, that would make them feel anxious or they’d just say no, but Tom is will be like “okay, give it a go.””

Good Lies emerged from a series of singles that Overmono released individually before having made the official call to put out a full-length LP. Although they’d already put out seven EPs, Ed says that the album “snuck up on [them]” when they had more time to write and produce.

Some of the songs that appear on the Good Lies had been created as demos or beats years prior but were never fully fleshed out. It wasn’t until Ed sent Tom an early version of the surreal “Good Lies,” a foundation point for the album that also served as its lead single.

Jody Hartley

“With all of our EPs, it’ll be seven or so tracks on these EPs written across a few years. It’s not like we sit down and write an EP in a few months – we’ve often just sat on tracks for ages,” Tom says. “But when Ed sent me “Good Lies,” I knew that was the anchor point and something that we could continue to come back to and use as a reference point.”

The Good Lies LP debuted in May 2023 with a cover of a Doberman looking up towards the sky, photographed by Rollo Jackson. The mascot appears throughout Overmono’s visuals and some fans have postured that the dog is a motif for the UK rave scene, which seems hardcore but can also be quite warm and welcoming. Overmono toured the album last fall and is currently gearing up for another solo run this fall, the Pure Devotion Tour. Not counting festival appearances, Pure Devotion is compact – just five stops throughout the US and Europe – but will mark their largest venues to date. Before the tour, they’ll be making their way around the summer festival circuit with around two dozen sets on the calendar.

Overmono also has a new single entitled “Gem Lingo (ovr now)” featuring Ruthven. The song originally made its debut during a Lot Radio set Overmono played with Fred again.. and Lil Yachty. Those viral moments are becoming increasingly frequent for the duo, especially when they’re in the US. But as their calendar fills up and their audience grows, Overmono’s priorities remain the same: they’re focused on continuing to experiment with new sounds, particularly after experiencing something of a breakthrough in their process while making Good Lies. Ed recalls that they weren’t concerned with making songs that were similar thematically but there was a silver lining to being sequestered at home for most of the pandemic. The tracks were all different and experimental in their own way and the brothers were surprised by the sheer cohesion that emerged.

“I was talking to a friend about this yesterday and I was saying, “I feel like we’ve been recording stuff in the like in the most wrong way possible for like the last eight years,”” Ed says. “I think that’s a good thing, sometimes, to just try and do things in an unconventional way.”

Some things, however, remain steadfast. The Doberman returns on the cover of “Gem Lingo,” looking straight at its listener.