AlunaGeorge : You Know You Like It EP
Late last year, with practically no publicity to speak of, UK duo AlunaGeorge issued a bleeping, buzzing summertime hit that somehow just missed out on both the seasonal sunshine and tastemaker radar. The response, or for that matter, acknowledgement, didn’t arrive until months later, but a consensus had nonetheless been reached on “You Know You Like It“: AlunaGeorge’s debut single was nothing short of genius. Boasting the cool atmosphere of the UK’s most haunting dubstep, yet with all of the silky soulful tones of Aaliyah, “You Know You Like It” successfully married the deep earworms of ’90s R&B with the production of the UK funky producers who so frequently referenced it.
Several months down the line, “You Know You Like It” is still one of 2012’s most unstoppable jams, despite having been originally released in 2011, but Tri Angle‘s re-release of the single joins it with some similarly stunning tracks on a new EP. The title track, of course, remains the highlight, a song so perfectly crafted that, should they never achieve such a height again, singer Aluna Francis and singer George Reid would still have more to be proud of than most artists. That said, more gold lies beneath. “Put Up Your Hands,” a more playful side of the group, chirps with layers of pitch-shifted vocals, bubbling like a blissful video game hallucination. Yet “Just a Touch” boasts almost as many hooks and heady production tricks, albeit with a slight trace of Balearic beats, to put it in competition with “You Know You Like It” for the EP’s true highlight.
Still fairly young in the grand scheme of things, what AlunaGeorge have offered thus far is just a taste of what they’re truly capable of. And yet, with just a handful of songs to their name, there’s very little here that isn’t amazing.
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Video: AlunaGeorge – “You Know You Like It”
Jeff Terich is the founder and editor of Treble. He's been writing about music for 20 years and has been published at American Songwriter, Bandcamp Daily, Reverb, Spin, Stereogum, uDiscoverMusic, VinylMePlease and some others that he's forgetting right now. He's still not tired of it.