08 | 2017 BREAKTHROUGH GROUP OF THE YEAR | Bob Moses | | The JUNO Awards

Initially connecting in high school in Vancouver, the two went their separate ways – Tom Howie to Boston’s Berklee College Of Music, Jimmy Vallance to the commercial dance charts producing big room floor fillers. After moving to New York City separately, only to serendipitously bump into each other in a car park and discover that they each had studios across the street from each other. While their introduction to dance music may have come in the genre’s traditionally communal setting, it’s Days Gone By’s potency in solitude that marks it out as a debut album worthy of deeper scrutiny. A sound palette that combines the elegantly icy with an indelibly human touch, its Cologne techno rhythms in the bottom, the elegant otherly distance of Detroit in the middle, and an unmistakably earthly, almost jazzy textures in the top end, anchored by Howie’s softly suggestive voice that doesn’t dominate, but instead plays out as another instrument in an alluring mix. Alternating between brooding dance floor burners and moments of reflective, downbeat repose, Days Gone By is a record that’s not in a rush to get to its destination, preferring to subtly, slowly seduce rather than sway and swagger into submission, weaving a rich spectrum of sensation over the course of its ten tracks.