AlunaGeorge
Body Music
(Universal Island Records)

The British duo of Aluna Francis and George Reid creates future-soul with definite pop sensibilities. Fusing electronic music with R&B, soul and experimental takes, the singer-songwriter and producer are fast-tracking it with their debut album, Body Music.

The wild part: the crew has been dropping singles from the album since August 2011, touring off the strength of those songs and amassing a dedicated fan-following in the process. With Aluna’s light-as-a-feather-vocals and George’s spacey production and instrumental skills on released tracks like the bouncy “You Know You Like It,” “Your Drums, Your Love,” and the snappy “Attracting Flies,” the pair also includes a great cover of Montell Jordan’s 1995 hit, “This Is How We Do It.”

In a recent interview with NPR, the duo said they included the track because “we both adored the song… We were doing some festivals last year and this year we’re doing loads of them, and this is all without us having an album out,” George admits.  “So we were expecting an awful lot of people to listen to an awful lot of songs that they’d never heard before. And it was a case of having something that people would recognize in our set.” Aluna chimes in, “A kind of feel-good anthem that we could make our own.” Their version is a glitchy, R&B piece that still holds the essence of the original, but it’s entirely cooler.

Body Music isn’t all about sweating it out on the dance floor either; mid-tempo and slow winding cuts like “Outlines,” “Diver” and “Friends To Lovers” are well worth plenty of slow dances as well.