The album ended up selling well, with their Sam Smith collaboration “Latch” making a strong play for Song of the Summer 2014. Soon, a lot of bands started sounding like Disclosure sounding like classic electronica. As Pitchfork’s Meaghan Garvey recently summarized, Settle “opened the doors for pop-adjacent neo-house acts like Duke Dumont, Years & Years, and Rudimental (not to mention for Sam Smith). ‘That sound is everywhere now,’ [Disclosure member] Guy [Howard], now 24, admitted in an L.A. Times profile this summer. ‘The same old bass lines, the same old samples. We’re a bit bored by it.’”

Which is not to say that Disclosure has left that sound behind. Caracal, the duo’s new album, feels like an acknowledgement of their influence, a show of power from two guys whose taste and talent landed them at the center of popular music. A number of guest spots go to huge names like The Weeknd and Lorde; it’s not unlike how Empire returned for Season Two with a host of superstar cameos that the show couldn’t have landed before it blew up. And while the band still uses the same sonic textures as before, metallic and cold, they’ve also subbed in slower grooves—backbeats derived from R&B rather than techno, the very same tempos that those huge guest stars already sing over on their own material.

As a result, Disclosure’s sacrificed energy while still sounding derivative. Part of the success of “Latch” came from how the sped-up whirring and clicking of the arrangement made Smith’s wailing almost feel inhuman, like that of a malfunctioning machine—the appeal was intensity, not, as is often the case with Smith, melodrama. But here, even when they do crank up the BPMs, as on “Echoes” or “Jaded,” it’s like a yet-more-tasteful refinement of the already-tasteful sonic mix from their debut. While the results aren’t offensive, they do give the impression of a group that feels more comfortable than they should. There’s no sense of rediscovery, of giddy dress-up, that helped make Settle so striking.

CHVRCHES’s debut, The Bones of What You Believe, came out a few months after Disclosure’s did in 2013. Electro-pop had already been an indie-rock staple for years, but the Scottish trio distilled it with study melodies, bright blocks of sound, and Lauren Mayberry’s clean, sharp voice. Each song was essentially a more emotionally serious version of Men Without Hats’s 1982 hit “Safety Dance” or one of its contemporaries. Fittingly, CHVRCHES opened up for Depeche Mode on a few dates; Mayberry then wrote an fannish blog post about the tour that also, inadvertently, nailed why her group’s take on an old sound was gaining so much traction: “In today’s musical climate of disposable pop with little to say versus deliberately obscure electro where all hints of a topline are buried beneath layers of effects and fear of seeming mainstream, Depeche Mode still stand alone, unafraid to foreground melody and imbue music with emotion in a way few other songwriters can.”