Why 'Between II Worlds' May Be Nero's Riskiest Move To Date

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Why 'Between II Worlds' May Be Nero's Riskiest Move To Date

The London trio talk expectations, the underground, and going pop: "It gets boring when everything sounds the same.”

After years of anticipation and months of speculation, Nero's second album, Between II Worlds, drops today. The group has been hinting at a follow-up to their era-defining, 2011 debut LP, Welcome Reality, for over a year now, and the album's release marks the completion of their transformation from a cinematic but club-focused UK bass duo to stadium-ready epic pop triad.

What sets producers Joe Ray, Daniel Stephens and vocalist Alana Watson apart from EDM also-rans is the depth and consistency of their futuro-noir narrative. Nero's music has maintained heavy doses of retro-futurism, brooding moods, and cinematic drama since their first release, 2004's "Space 2001," a breakbeat clusterfuck that samples Strauss' "Sunrise," better known as the theme to 2001: A Space Odyssey.

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When it came out at the turn of this decade, Welcome Reality felt like a fully formed exposition of the universe Nero had built with their music, a world somewhere between Blade Runner, Ed Banger, and Benga. The record is often credited as being one of the best concept albums of the EDM era. There's only one problem with that accolade: It wasn't a concept album at all.

"When we made Welcome Reality we didn't intend it to be a concept album. It was the fans and the press that made it that," Stephens tells THUMP in the duo's spartan studio space in their native North London. "There is definitely a story behind it, but we didn't make it thinking it was a concept album."

"We were listening to a lot of Ed Banger stuff; Justice were a big influence, and we were drawn in by the 80s and science fiction films," Ray further explains. "We've always had a focus on sampling old music, lots of disco samples in particular. We were using samples as a way of looking back at the past, but blending it with modern digitalism and soundscapes."

The result was an expansive album that reached into pop, electro, drum and bass, rock, and most famously, dubstep. "Promises," particularly the Skrillex remix of it, might be the definitive tune of the dub-to-brostep EDM explosion of the early 2010s. Now that "dubstep" is almost a dirty word in dance music, Nero has faced the unenviable task of redefining themselves in the vastly different musical climate of 2015.

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"It's been quite daunting at times," admits Ray. "As you get older, your tastes change. Even if dubstep had still been huge, it isn't what we would be wanting to write now anyway."

Figuring out what they did want to write is one of the reasons the album's release was pushed back on more than one occasion; in the interim, Nero aggressively toured the worldwide festival circuit atop a towering bank of broken TVs and boomboxes, releasing the segue (Won't You) Be There EP and adding a cut to the soundtrack of Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby in the process. "We only finished the last bit of Between II Worlds about four months ago," says Stephens. "But there are, like, a hundred songs we've written that aren't on this album."

The tracks that did make the cut show Nero at a pivotal moment in their career as they impose their aesthetic onto current sounds, everything from future house to radio-rock, and in turn move away from club tracks and towards pop songs.

Early signs did not suggest this would be the case. "Satisfy" hit the internet in May of 2014. It's a rollicking industrial heater guaranteed to get any dancefloor smoldering, and hearing it alongside a corresponding "Satisfy Mix" that checks everyone from Gesaffelstein to Depeche Mode to Psychemagick, fans would have been forgiven for thinking that the group had dropped both the pop and the wub from their catalogue entirely. "It gave us the feeling that 'Doomsday' did," says Stephens of writing the tune, referencing Welcome Reality's album opener, a pristine illustration of the late-electro aesthetic. "[Satisfy] is a dancefloor killer, the opening tune to a set. We knew it was a dark, quite industrial track. And we knew we didn't have ten more of those."

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It was a whole seven months later that Nero released "The Thrill," perhaps a more appropriate indicator of the group's current direction. It's an electronic rock song, total radio-bait, and announced Alana Watson's elevated position within the group. No longer competing with busy samples and gnarled synth experimentation, her breathy-yet-powerful vocals and anthemic melodies have taken center stage.

"We love pop music," says Stephens. "The melodic side—that's what gets us going. Not just something that goes off on a dancefloor. We've been playing stuff on piano and just composing. We're trying to take the emphasis towards bringing the musical elements back in, focus on a track that's gonna work in a club but isn't a headache to listen to. That's why there's not much instrumental stuff on this album. There's more of a focus on vocal melodies."

Such bold nods to the mainstream are a far cry from Nero's moment of conception, a bro-down between childhood friends deep in the depths of Fabric, London's house of worship for uncompromising urban bass music. Nero's initial release on MTA Records, the dubstep/drum and bass double header of "Innocence/Electron" in 2010, found them darlings of the London underground scene, but only six months later, they released the comparably saccharine "Me and You," and it was obvious that the duo had their eyes on a bigger prize.

This kicked off a tenuous relationship between the group and their home city, caught between the hometown scene that wrought them and their vast creative palate and ambitions for global success. "London is still our number one fan base, which is nice because I feel like we neglected England for quite a while," says Ray. "But the London scene is very fickle in the way that it'll be on one type of music and then hop onto the next very quickly. You always end up sort of one step behind," he says, before pausing and adding, "But is there even such thing as the underground anymore?"

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Perhaps the most intrepid maneuver of Nero's entire career is track 7 on Between II Worlds, "Into the Night." It's a hands-in-the-air mainstage number, somewhere between French touch and progressive house and light-years away from the majority of their catalogue. Somewhat ironically, this embrace of convention, speaking directly to the mainstream without the cushion of UK underground sonics or even their patented darkness, is the biggest risk Nero have ever taken.

"When we played 'Into the Night' live, we were a little worried as to how it was going to work," says Stephens. "And when we did it, people weren't dancing. In our perspective it didn't go down very well. But afterwards, people said it was one of the best moments of the entire set."

"I think when you DJ you read into the crowd reaction too much, so even though people aren't going as crazy, doesn't mean they're not enjoying it," says Ray. "It could just mean they're listening to it more. Dance music doesn't have to be in your face all the time; sometimes you can just listen and enjoy too. It gets boring when everything sounds the same."

Dubstep, electro, drum and bass, EDM, pop, rock, underground, overground, London, America—it's between these worlds that Nero has come to define and redefine itself throughout the group's career. Most would get lost in the static, but the three friends from North London have held it all together with a shared understanding: whatever tempo, key, or they're playing in, Nero will always be Nero.

"It's definitely a strength and a weakness," says Ray. "Sometimes it can feel like it's so much, because we are caught in between so many different things. It's good and bad, but you have to trust yourself and we've done what we've always done, and that's do what we want to do and write what we want to write. At the end of the day, I think it's most important that whatever we do actually connects."

Find Nero on Facebook // SoundCloud // Twitter
and Between II Worlds on iTunes