Not for a minute do you actually imagine Honne – the duo of Andy Clutterbuck and James Hatcher – were created in a major-label marketing meeting after a focus group threw up the urgent need for an east London-based outfit that sounded like a lower-register James Blake produced by Jungle. But had Honne not spontaneously appeared – two university pals united by West Country childhoods, a fetish for Japan and the vibes of the west coast – some svengali would probably have invented them.
The pair have found a sweet, sweet spot in which to release their debut album, combining a number of successful strands of millennial tuneage with nigh-on surgical grace. Like the many EPs that precede it, Warm on a Cold Night is sleek and highly processed, as befits one of the hotly anticipated sophisticated pop&B albums of 2016.
It is eminently danceable, but not braindead. Funk bubbles away down below, but the lyrics are well worth tuning into. A song such as Til the Evening tracks the sun across the sky. “We got nowhere to go/ We got time to waste,” intones Honne’s singing half, Andy Clutterbuck. But this is not just some blissed-out, Balearic framing device. “We got nothing to show for it/Just a bitter taste,” Clutterbuck mourns.
The songs are sexual, but not sexist: Honne are the kinds of guys to prostrate themselves before all womanhood, bruised romantics who swear (on previously released songs such as The Night) they will make staying over worth your while. “Oh, it’s you, girl,” sighs Clutterbuck, transported. The word Honne means “innermost feelings” in Japanese; they’ve called their label Tatemae after its Japanese opposite: the feelings you show in public.
Clutterbuck is a singer-who-also-writes, a battered voice who combines lovesick weariness with a soupcon of blue-eyed soul. Hatcher, meanwhile, is the production wing. Together, their distillations of R&B laced with synths and percolating guitars filch from all the slickest bits of every decade. Little found sounds and just-so samples give virtually every track depth, width and height as well as linearity.
It’s still pretty mainstream – there is nothing wildly new in these 12 tracks of sweet nothings aimed at the feet; Izzy Bizu features as a guest vocalist. Is it cheesy to begin the album with a too smooth radio DJ playing Honne at 3.17am? Yes it is, even if the device is obviously tongue in cheek.
But so many of these songs are like Trojan horses. Take One at a Time Please. There’s an uncontroversial funk undercarriage, embellished with producerly filigree: a little party noise, a little piano run. But Clutterbuck is squirming hard as he moves from one uncomfortable situation to another: people shoving, people sizing him up, people misguidedly wanting to give him “a taste of celebrity”, him putting his foot in his mouth. “Oh, why did I say that?” he mutters, ruefully.
