Embrace, Daylight, Sunshine, Dance.

Daylight, the second album by Hifi Sean and David McAlmont, came out in August. 

 

Given that their debut, Happy Ending, was my album of the year for two consecutive years - 2022 for the initial double vinyl, 2023 with the official multi-format release - expectations were high for the follow up.

 

So, how do you follow up the grand ambition of an album that spanned genres and sounded like it cost a million bucks to produce? Well, by recording not one but two albums in quick succession, for starters!

Daylight is out now, its companion Twilight will be with us on Valentine's Day 2025. The promo blurb will tell you that Daylight "celebrates, expresses and explores the colours and feel of summer". Which it does with gusto, but it's even more than that.

 

Daylight opens with the title track, sounding like a transmission coming from another planet, David McAlmont intoning,

 

Daylight becomes twilight,

Twilight becomes daylight,

Daylight becomes twilight,

Twilight becomes daylight

 

before Sean Dickson drops in lovely layers of insistent chords and synth waves, building up a bubbling, clubby anthem. The chorus fades in with Embrace, Daylight, Sunshine, Dance at 1:50, only for the entire song to fade out a minute later.

 

Lesson one: Daylight is short and snappy, an album full of bangers, all but the last two of twelve tracks under four minutes. None outstay their welcome, all make you hungry for more, which is exactly as it should be.

 

I described Happy Ending as sounding like a greatest hits album and, despite Daylight's different aesthetic and raison d'être, it plays like volume two of a Best Of. Second track Sun Come Up was the second single just ahead of the album coming out, but Coalition and You Are My would have been equally strong contenders. They're all really that good.

 

Meantime comes in like a lost New Order track, though we're inevitably talking Bizarre Love Triangle vibes rather than In A Lonely Place. 

 

Lesson two: April's lead-in single Sad Banger is the closest things get to melancholy, but even then there's an insistent, progressive pace that propels the listener forward and ultimately into the next, er, banger.

 

 

USB - USC is a mad, brilliant paean to packing a suitcase for an overseas holiday. Who would have thought a to do list could sound so uplifting?

Sunblock

Repellent

After sun

Moisturiser

Papers 

Bluetooth speaker

USB to USC

Phone charger

Laptop

Euro adapter

...and so on. Proof if needed that David McAlmont could read the contraindications in a packet of prescription medicine and still make it sound like the most joyful thing that you've ever heard.

 

I feel like I'm arbitrarily skipping songs here, but I'm struggling to find different ways of saying it's all so beautiful, so invigorating, so much fun. What Sean and David have done here is demonstrate beyond all doubt that you can write songs that are aimed squarely at the dancefloor, are sonically uplifting without sacrificing vocal or lyrical heft.

Lesson three: The songs are choc full of one-liners. When David asserts in Living Things that he's "gonna rig [his] own aurora borealis", you think, "yeah, why not?". 

Third single and penultimate song Celebrate contains the brilliant line, "My instinct for survival is to celebrate", which inspired Friday's Dubhed selection title and is a great big hook in a tune that's full of them.  

 

I'll divert slightly to also recommend the Celebrate Remix E.P. which came out earlier this month. Three varied and superb mixes, including reworkings by Shaka Loves You and Tronik Youth, as well as Hifi Sean's own extended Night Version. 

 

 

In the blink of an eye, it's time for album closer The Show. If I were aiming for a soundbite summary, I'd perhaps say it's like 21st century O.M.D. locked in a room with Giorgio Moroder circa 1977. At the same time, it's unmistakably Hifi Sean and David McAlmont and could be no-one else. The album ends as it began, with David intonation of "Daylight becomes twilight".

Brilliantly, the duo have gone into the studio fizzing with creative energy and joie de vivre and managed to channel that into a 12-song, 40-minute album that does exactly what the title promises. 

 

Lesson four: I've been listening to the album frequently during the height of summer. Now that we're getting into autumn, the temperature has dropped, the nights are drawing in and the rain seems ceaseless, more than ever we need Daylight.