Professional ratings
Aggregate scores
Source	Rating
Metacritic	86/100
Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic
The A.V. Club	B
The Guardian
Mojo
NME	8/10
The Observer
Pitchfork	9.1/10
Q
Spin
The Times

Hercules and Love Affair is the debut studio album by American electronic music band Hercules and Love Affair, released on March 10, 2008 by DFA Records. The album was produced by Andrew Butler and Tim Goldsworthy. Andrew Raposo (of fellow DFA band Automato) and Tyler Pope (of !!!) contributed bass to the album, while Antony Hegarty co-wrote and performed vocals on select songs.

Most reviewers comment on the album's musical style as an homage to or re-imagining of disco and classic house music. Fact Magazine dubbed the album's style "a pulsating, glamorous, elegiac mix of classic disco influences, live instrumentation and modernist, mind-spangling electronic production." Similarly, The Daily Telegraph critic Bernadette McNulty dubs the music "d-i-s-c-o in its seventies glory" into which "Butler weaves [...] fractured Chicago house beats and pulsing synths," going on to refer to the overall style of the album as "a tableau of beautiful, dysphoric disco visions."The Guardian also describes the music in the same terms, commenting "it sounds like proper late-70s disco. Not the camp glitterball retro electro-pop of Kylie circa 'Spinning Round', but actual underground disco, like something long-lost from the vaults of The Loft or the Paradise Garage, real 1977–78 vintage stuff." However, while most focus on the obvious musical debt to disco, some critics highlight the album's eclectic range of styles, such as Eddy Lawrence, for whom the album "has dark, psychedelic moments, such as the downbeat, mildly menacing, almost Congotronic 'Easy' alongside outright funky party stuff like 'You Belong'." Butler himself describes the album's musical approach thus:

I always say it's a rhythmic, artsy kind of pop music that was made with classic dance and electronic music in mind. It has a lot of vocals and is rooted in my childhood.

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Wikipedia