British electronic duo The Chemical Brothers will be releasing a new single called “The Darkness You Fear” on Friday, April 23. It’s their first single since the release of their 2019 album No Geography.
They teased a few seconds of the song on Twitter along with an abstract video edit of a couple of people dancing at a concert. From the preview, it appears to be a psychedelic track with a sparse bass rhythm and a dense atmosphere of electronic sounds and effects. A female vocalist sings what sounds like, “Made you hot/See the colors.”
When Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons teamed up in 1989 in Manchester, UK, they were originally called The Dust Brothers. They began releasing EPs in the early 1990s and making a name for themselves as one of the pioneers of the ‘big beat’ subgenre of breakbeat music, along with others like Meat Beat Manifesto and The Prodigy. Breakbeat is a style that uses sampled or programmed drum breaks as the basis for beats at slower tempos than that of ‘drum and bass’ music. For ‘big beat,’ artists such as The Chemical Brothers took those breaks and melded them to something with more of a pop-friendly structure and prominent bass lines.
The duo broke out when they adopted The Chemical Brothers as their name and released their debut full-length Exit Planet Dust in 1995, promoting singles like “Leave Home” and “Life Is Sweet.” Their following albums Dig Your Own Hole (1997), Surrender (1999) and Come With Us (2002) were particularly critically acclaimed as a blend of hypnotic rhythms and party-worthy energy. Dig Your Own Hole tracks “Block Rockin’ Beats” and “Setting Sun” each hit #1 on the UK singles charts, but their biggest hits on Spotify today are songs that only came close such as “Hey Boy Hey Girl,” “Let Forever Be” and “Star Guitar,” as well as their memorable standout track “Galvanize,” from Push the Button (2005).
In total, they’ve put out nine studio albums and haven’t shown signs of quitting any time soon. They’re known to pull large crowds at music festivals all over the world, and had planned to play at recent festivals such as Sónar Barcelona, Festival Estéreo Picnic in Bogotá, Columbia and Open’er in Gdynia, Poland.
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