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The UK producer speaks on honoring the roots of disco & creating club-less dance music with his new album ‘times.’
12
Mar
Mar
The UK producer speaks on honoring the roots of disco & creating club-less dance music with his new album ‘times.’
The early days of the COVID-19 pandemic were filled with uncertainty and fear but also a naive sense of optimism. “We’ll dance again soon,” read nightclub marquees in place of the next party billing. “Tune in to our Friday night Instagram Live stream.” As the pandemic dragged on, some have seen that initial hope crowded out by impatience, despair, and even an odd sense of Stockholm Syndrome. What was so appealing about licking the sweat off a stranger’s face at 4 AM in the first place, and why were people so eager to get back to it?
Despite fierce headwinds, dance music soldiered on and re-encroached itself into pop, which for the last several years had seen an influx of downbeat emo influences exemplified by acts like Billie Eilish and Lil Uzi Vert. In the past year, artists like Dua Lipa, Lady Gaga, Jessie Ware, and Kylie Minogue kept their ear firmly trained to a dance floor that now only exists in our collective memories. 26-year-old UK producer and artist SG Lewis looks to do the same with his recently released debut album, times, which blends classic disco influences and modern electronic dance sounds into a dreamy vision of a clubbing future that appears to be approaching sooner than expected.
“Dance music and going out to the club, it’s not just a hedonistic thing that people do to pass the time,” he said in a recent Zoom interview with Genius, noting the pivotal role nightlife plays as a cultural axis for marginalized communities. “Clearly, it’s important to enough people, and it has enough of a cultural resonance that people still want to listen to this music and transport themselves there because of the way that those spaces have made them feel along the way.”
For Lewis, the connection is personal. He first found himself as a teenager in the Reading and Liverpool nightlife scenes, where he was immediately drawn to the equalizing power of dance. “All these people could be whoever they wanted to be,” he said. “Musically, I’m constantly searching for something that provides an element of euphoria or escapism.”
The Republic Records signee made noise with his Dusk, Dark, and Dawn EP series in 2018 and 2019, as well as some heralded production work for the likes of Khalid and Victoria Monét (“Experience”), G-Eazy (“No Less”), and Clairo (“Throwaway”). Last year, he scored a major placement with “Hallucinate” from Dua Lipa’s Future Nostalgia, an album that proved to be the defining dance soundtrack to the early parts of COVID quarantine. His debut presents himself as a child of nightlife and a student of disco’s Black queer roots.
The 1970s disco scene was a haven for the LGBTQ community at a time when its first true civil rights movement was just taking shape in the US (and before the AIDS epidemic ravaged the community in the 1980s). NYC’s disco clubs were famous for an anything-goes, free-love atmosphere, and provided an avenue for songs by Black, female, and gay artists to slip into the mainstream conscience without the music industry’s traditional gatekeeping. Many have blamed the intense “Disco Sucks” backlash the genre cultivated by the end of the decade on the way it uplifted voices traditionally marginalized in American society.
“Reading about how disco was the celebratory soundtrack to these safe spaces and this inclusivity—people from different walks of life, sexualities, races—it was one of the first times that people were coming together in rooms in that nature,” said Lewis. “I think it’s so important to push the message of inclusivity in dance music because, in my eyes, if you’re racist or homophobic, you don’t get to enjoy the fruits of those communities and the music that’s been made from there.”
The album features a spoken-word intro and interlude taken from a personal interview Lewis conducted with Alex Rosner, a Holocaust survivor who made a name for himself designing the sound systems for legendary New York City disco clubs like The Loft and The Gallery. He taps well-respected collaborators like Chic co-founder and disco legend Nile Rodgers, dance pop queen Robyn, and era-defining Neptunes producer Chad Hugo. He also cites the likes of Jackie Moore, Gloria Gaynor, Sister Sledge, and DJs David Mancuso and Larry Levan as major influences on his sound.
