Nero (DJ Set)

“Love will always still exist,” insists NERO front-woman Alana Watson. “Far into the future, when all that remains is rubble and destruction, there’ll be that shaft of light coming up through the ruins.” Grammy Award-winning, Ivor Novello-nominated trio NERO return this year with an album that celebrates that sense of love among the ruins, and cements their reputation as one of Britain’s most exciting bands. It both complements 2012’s Number One album ‘Welcome Reality’ (and attendant hits ‘Me & You’, ‘Guilt’ and the chart-topping smash ‘Promises’) and pushes the band’s apocalyptic and frequently romantic electronic sound further than ever before. As ‘Into The Past’, their 2013 contribution to Baz Luhrmann’s Great Gatsby soundtrack hinted, and their 2015 Coachella headline slot proved, the now fully formed three-piece are more finely tuned now than ever before. Completed in London during the spring of 2015, ‘Between II Worlds’ began life three years ago in LA, in the Hollywood Hills house where Orson Welles wrote Citizen Kane. Magnificent set up single ‘The Thrill’ was the first song the band wrote during those sessions. “We must have rewritten it 100 times after that,” smiles Dan Stephens who, alongside Joe Ray, founded NERO in 2004. “And inevitably we ended up going straight back to the first version.” Adds Joe: “If you’ve been working on a track for that long and it still flicks your switches, you know where must be something about it.” ‘The Thrill’ is a striking example of how far the band’s songwriting has progressed but the super-stylised, bass-heavy sound is unmistakably NERO, even if the styles and influences that pepper the band’s back catalogue – from classical, to rave, to drum ’n’ bass, dubstep and pop – mean the Nero sound often defies categorisation. “We’ve always liked pop craft in terms of song structure,” Dan says, “but it’s a constant battle to make that work with electronic and dance elements.” It’s a battle that’s paid off – and as the title…