Plenty of house and techno caters to drifting, lost-in-the-moment dancefloors. Brisbane’s X Club, the ascendant duo of DJs and producers Ben Clarke and Jesse Morath, deal in more immediate thrills.
Hitting their stride in the early pandemic with a series of raw and propulsive releases, including on London-based Australian expat Mall Grab’s Steel City Dance Discs, X Club found a ready audience in Australia and the northern hemisphere. By 2022, with borders opening up again, the duo’s pacy, raucous DJ sets clicked immediately with dancers craving fast tempos and hard kicks.
Throughout their rise and post-lockdown move from Brisbane to London, Clarke and Morath have embodied a wide-eyed exuberance; their Instagram feed is a blur of behind-the-DJ videos featuring the pair bouncing and fist pumping for equally animated crowds. While the X Club sound feels right at home in Europe, the duo’s success highlights the outsized strength of Brisbane’s dance music scene, which has also produced Claire Morgan, Sampology, Hannah D and Dameeeela.
X Club’s appeal is rooted in their prolific output, starting in 2019 with their grimy, warehouse-ready debut EP, Scum. On 2022’s Public Disturbance, Clarke and Morath pivoted nimbly from the strobing techno of These Streets Look Dangerous to the springier breakbeats of Only If U, featuring the Melbourne producer and singer Pretty Girl. After launching their label Hide the Junk, the duo closed out 2023 with cheeky edits of dance relics Deee-Lite and Lock’n’Load – catnip for peak time at the rave. X Club’s latest EP, New World Expression, tunnels into more housey terrain that still bears their signature heft and velocity. As Morath put it in an interview: “Our music is more a feeling and an energy, as opposed to one genre.”
A few months back X Club’s main stage set from Victoria’s ill-fated 2024 Pitch festival appeared on YouTube. Across two breathless hours with lasers skimming over a sea of bobbing doof sticks, the set features the full breadth of their production output, including tracks for New World Expression they’d just completed in the Joshua Tree desert. As crowning moments go, it’s the stuff of dance music dreams – with an energy that’s pure X Club.
For more: X Club tour across North America and Europe for the rest of the year before returning to Australia in December for a Boiler Room set in Sydney and a show in the Gold Coast.
This month Guardian Australia also listened to …
Allday – The Necklace (out now)
The Adelaide-born rapper-singer Allday furthers the lovelorn louche persona he has built over his last three records. The standout is early single Miss You Still, featuring cameos from Cub Sport and Ben Lee.
Fanning Dempsey National Park – The Deluge (out now)
Bernard Fanning and Paul Dempsey! Lots of suits and synths! “The party hasn’t truly started until the sax solo begins,” they told us.
3% – Kill the Dead (out now)
A supergroup comprising the First Nations hip-hop artists Nooky, Dallas Woods and Angus Fields, 3%’s first record as a trio is equal parts party and polemic – never clearer than in album closer Our People, which flips the Presets classic into a rallying cry against Indigenous incarceration.
Sycco – Zorb (23 August)
After a string of crystalline pop singles, Sycco is here with her debut album: a little more acerbic, a little pacier than her early work. Breakbeats and bratty vocal inflections abound.
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds – Wild God (30 August)
Suffice to say that a new Nick Cave album is always an event.
