About

- The Analog Vault // Essential Listening -

From the inception of their blog Feel My Bicep, where they posted obscure Chicago house, Detroit techno and Italo disco edits, to their eventual turn as DJs and producers themselves - Northern Irish electronic music duo Bicep were at the vanguard of UK’s club scene in the 2010s. Simultaneously nostalgic and forward-thinking, the pair’s passion for fusing and pushing their disparate influences into uncharted territories crystallised via their 2017 debut album on Ninja Tune. 

This debut eponymous record was a heady yet dancefloor-ready confluence of vintage techno, disco synths, jungle breaks and garage house - surveying and updating the entirety of underground British sounds to create a shimmering serotonin rush. Bicep finds the duo flexing on all 12 tracks – one can’t help but admire their muscular production chops. The album features their singularly spectacular electronic anthem Glue.- The Analog Vault

Bicep are first and foremost music lovers with a deep-rooted knowledge and passion for music of all varieties. Having been introduced to electronic music through the likes of Aphex Twin and Laurent Garnier, they started digging deeper into IDM, italo, techno, electro, jungle & everything in between.

The formidable DJs (#8 in Resident Advisor’s 2016 poll) have toured the world over, curating and selling out a long list of Feel My Bicep parties including Manchester Warehouse Project, a 12-week residency at XOYO and their annual Italo Disco parties.

The album “Bicep” is the perfect summation of the duo’s career to date - it’s a sonic tour of their history touching the cornerstones of underground club culture. Matt and Andy have pulled off the rarest of feats, to make a singularly unique electronic record founded on the blueprint of classic house, techno, electro and Italo disco, but flipped and morphed into a fresh design bearing the unique Bicep sonic signature. It’s a perfectly succinct album: loose, raw and energetic enough for the dancefloor, yet refined, artfully composed and contemplative enough for home listening. – Ninja Tune

Bicep's production values are impeccable. The breaks are cut up with a precision touch, while the ultra-glossy melodies, even at their most melodramatic, are affecting and hummable. This is modern dance music that homes in on the melodic pleasures of progressive house and trance while avoiding the excess of those genres.

All of these factors make Bicep the kind of robust, well-rounded debut album you'd expect from a duo who have always made rock solid tunes. Bicep's tracks often rummage through dance music's collective memory—they broke out with a classic house pastiche, "Vision Of Love," after all. But they outdo themselves on Bicep, taking unfashionable sounds and making them feel contemporary, relevant and, most of all, exciting. Bicep have never been afraid to go for broke, and their debut album is all the better for it. – Resident Advisor

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