Starting his career in the late 2000s, Brett Ewels, aka Louis La Roche, always held a deep-rooted passion for disco music. His soulful debut album To Rest is to Rust (2015) took a funkier direction, while the mellow, nocturnal parlance of its successor Sleepless Nights had a stab at French house. Meanwhile, Ewels’ third album in five years, Saturday Night Griever, ventured into indie pop and saw him collaborate with a different vocalist on every track.
These shifts in direction allowed the Norwich-based producer to reference his love for disco without being too obvious. However, the combined trauma of the Covid pandemic and a near-death experience in the family saw him yearning for the comfort of his teenage self and the genre’s halcyon days. Conceptually tied to the 40th anniversary of the closure of Studio 54, on his latest release, We’re Not So Different, Ewel brings disco’s iconic sound back to life with unerring accuracy.
Why has it taken until your fourth album to pay proper homage to disco –a genre you admit is a major influence?
“It’s not that I moved away from disco, because I’ve always enjoyed listening to and making it, but I wanted to go further and create traditional pop music. I first started making music at around 17 years old. At the time, disco was my comfort zone genre, so it was fun to return to it with
