Dusky

Solarity, and then a different name

Dusky are Nick Harriman and Alfie Granger-Howell, a London pair who had already been making records together as Solarity before settling on the name they still use in 2011. That was also the year of the first Dusky album, Stick By This, which came out on Anjunadeep and was picked up by Pete Tong as one of the albums of the year, with further support from Radio 1 quarters including Rob da Bank and Zane Lowe.

The reference points they have described over the years sit some distance from the four-four they ended up making: classical and jazz training on one side, obscure electronica on the other. It shows in the way the records are put together rather than in any obvious genre borrowing — the drums are club drums, but the chords tend to be doing something a little more awkward than the arrangement lets on.

Flo Jam, Careless, and the Beatport years

The crossover moment arrived in 2012 with Flo Jam, which was named iTunes Dance Single of the Year and travelled well outside the house circuit it came from. The following year the duo were voted Best British Producers by DJ Mag, and they were named among the contenders for the BBC Essential Mix of the Year.

Careless, from 2014, is the record most people still know. It went to number one on the Beatport Top 100 and stayed there for three consecutive weeks, and their current label reckons it has now passed fourteen million streams. Alongside it came the run of club work that put them on the DJ Mag cover, into residencies at fabric and XOYO in London, onto the bill at Berlin's Panorama Bar, and out to Glastonbury, Exit, Electric Daisy Carnival and Ultra.

17 Steps, and the business of running a shop

In July 2014 the pair started their own imprint, 17 Steps, opening it with the Love Taking Over EP. What followed was less a vanity outlet than a working label: releases and remixes from Nathan Micay, LTJ Bukem, Interplanetary Criminal, Denham Audio and Shed, spread across house, breaks, jungle and the harder end of UK club music.

The label reached ten years with Floor To Floor: 10 Years of 17 Steps, released on 5 April 2024. It runs to seventeen extended mixes and reads like a map of who the label had been backing — AIDA, Ikonika, Roska, Stones Taro, Kassian, Borai, Machine Dion, Smokey Bubblin' B — with two Dusky entries of their own, Proto Spoon and Camellia, the latter made with Aldonna.

Their own albums went the same way. After Outer in 2016, both Joy in 2021 and Pressure in 2022 came out on 17 Steps rather than through anyone else, which is worth holding in mind when considering what happened this year.

Signals: a fifth album, and a return

Signals was announced on 20 July 2026 and released on 25 September 2026. It is the duo's fifth studio album, and it puts them back on Anjunadeep, the label that put out Stick By This fifteen years earlier and had not released a Dusky album since.

The record runs to thirteen tracks, with extended mixes of Elm and Next Life added on the second disc of the double vinyl, pressed on pink and blue marble. Rromarin sings on three of them — Lustre, Next Life and Deep Cuts — and Kadhalan is a collaboration with Nadeem Karim and Pritt. Next Life went out ahead of the album as the advance single.

The shape of the thing is unusual for a club act. Almost everything on the album version sits between two minutes forty-nine seconds and four minutes twenty-four, and the label's own framing puts the emphasis on the tempo coming down in places, with soul and disco touches and played instrumentation rather than sampled. The driving material is still there; it is no longer the whole record.

Autumn 2026: where they actually are

The touring started before the album did. Dusky played Paradox Music Hall in Berlin on 23 May 2026, the Steel Yard in Sheffield on 20 June, and LAB11 in Digbeth on 5 September, with a DJ set at a Signals album pop-up filmed for release around the same period.

The Signals tour proper opened in North America in October: Elsewhere in Brooklyn on 2 October, Newspeak in Montreal on the 3rd, Bloom in Indianapolis on the 4th, then Washington DC on the 9th, Chicago on the 10th and Toronto on the 11th. Europe follows through October and November — Electric Studios in Sheffield on the 16th, Hangar 34 in Liverpool on the 17th, Shelter in Amsterdam on the 23rd, Joshua Brooks in Manchester on the 24th, Bristol on the 30th, Patterns in Brighton on the 31st, Sacré in Paris on 6 November, Faith in Strangers in Margate on the 7th, Sneaky Pete's in Edinburgh on the 8th, Culture Box in Copenhagen on the 13th.

The London dates are the ones that stand out. Phonox in Brixton has them in for what is billed as Dusky: Originals, a set drawn entirely from their own catalogue between 2010 and 2025, running 16:00 to 22:00 — six hours, no support act listed, five pounds in advance. There are two of them in the diary, 14 and 21 November 2026, one added as a second date. After that it is World Headquarters in Newcastle on 27 November, the Ulster Sports Club in Belfast on 4 December, block. in Dublin on the 5th, Audio in San Francisco on the 11th, New Year's Eve at Selinas in Sydney and Surfers Paradise on 1 January 2027.

The venue list says as much about their standing as the chart history does. These are small and mid-sized clubs, largely 300 to 1,000 capacity rooms, in a period when acts with a comparable back catalogue are chasing festival main stages. The album went out through a label with proper distribution; the shows stayed on the circuit that made them.