This is UK garage DNA crammed into a dubstep shell, which sounds like a terrible idea until you actually hear it work. Flava D’s been doing things with bass music for years that most producers don’t even know to attempt. D Double E is on here and that alone should be enough to get you to click play. The way his flow rides the beat is effortless — this is what MC culture over electronic music should sound like. SKALAH brings a harder edge to the bass work. Together the three of them make something that doesn’t fit neatly into any category, which is probably why I keep coming back to it. There’s a timestamp somewhere in the middle where the whole thing drops into something quieter for about four seconds and then just explodes back. That’s the moment. UK bass culture doesn’t do the collaboration thing half-heartedly and this...
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June 06, 2026 at 12:27 PM 1 min read
Flava D, SKALAH & D Double E - Different
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June 06, 2026 at 10:38 AM
1 min read
Sub Zero Project: 2025-2026 in three tracks
Read more . . . →Sub Zero Project has been releasing at a rate that should be illegal and somehow the quality hasn’t dropped. They’re back on the Defqon.1 mainstage this June — again — and these three tracks from the last twelve months explain why nobody’s surprised.
1. Sub Zero Project - Our World
Most recent drop from Sub Zero Project and it sounds exactly like what they’ve been building toward for the last few years: full mainstage energy, production that leaves nothing on the table. Not subtle. Doesn’t need to be.
2. Sub Zero Project & Dual Damage - It Will Be OK
The April 2025 collab with Dual Damage pulled in more atmosphere than the typical Sub Zero Project release without losing the weight. Still hits hard. The title is not reassuring in the way...
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June 06, 2026 at 10:08 AM 1 min read
Eynka feat. Låpsley - Promises
Read more . . . →Låpsley’s voice does something specific to electronic music — it cools it down by a few degrees in a way that makes the warm parts hit harder by contrast. Eynka have clearly understood this and built an entire track around it. Promises is melodic trance but it doesn’t push into the overwrought territory a lot of melodic trance tends toward. The restraint is what makes it. There’s a sense of longing running through the whole track that the production matches without overselling it. Armada puts out a lot of music and a lot of it blurs together, but this one stuck. Låpsley has that quality where she makes you feel like the song is being sung specifically to you in a quiet room, and when you drop that into an electronic context the effect is very deliberate. This is a late night track. Give it the right setting and the...
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June 06, 2026 at 9:39 AM 1 min read
Eelke Kleijn - Tonco Liveset (Armada Invites)
Read more . . . →Sometimes you don’t want a three-minute hit, you want to disappear into a full set, and Eelke Kleijn’s Armada Invites session at Tonco is built for exactly that. This is melodic, progressive, deeply-patient house and trance from a guy who has been doing it long enough to have nothing left to prove. The setting helps: gorgeous location, golden-hour light, the kind of crowd that came to listen rather than film. Kleijn reads a room better than almost anyone, layering tracks so smoothly you stop noticing the transitions and just let the thing carry you. Put this on while you work, while you cook, while you stare out a window questioning your choices, and it quietly improves whatever you’re doing. The middle stretch in particular goes somewhere genuinely beautiful. I lost about forty minutes to it without meaning to, which is the entire point of a good liveset. Bookmark it for...
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June 06, 2026 at 7:10 AM 1 min read
Yomanda - Sunshine (MDDLTN Re-Edit)
Read more . . . →Yomanda’s “Sunshine” has been quietly iconic in UK trance circles since the late 90s, and MDDLTN’s re-edit does exactly what a good re-edit should — it makes you hear the original differently without touching what made it work in the first place. The production update modernizes the sound without scrubbing the soul out of it, which is a line a lot of re-edits badly fail to walk. The bassline gets a bit more presence, the arrangement breathes differently, and the hook still absolutely slaps. This is the kind of trance that has genuine emotional weight rather than just the obligatory four-on-the-floor build-drop-repeat structure. If you’re too young to know the original, this is an excellent place to start — and then go backwards. If you grew up with it, this is going to do something involuntary to your brain stem. Armada has been sitting on a catalog of gold for...
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June 06, 2026 at 6:43 AM
1 min read
X&Y turns 21 and it still sucks
Read more . . . →21 years ago today, Coldplay released X&Y. It still sucks.
Thirteen tracks of a band straining to sound enormous and landing on damp. “Speed of Sound” is just “Clocks” with the batteries dying. “Fix You” is a motivational poster you can cry to at both weddings and funerals, depending on the open bar. The whole thing is so airless that Chris Martin spent the next decade telling interviewers it wasn’t very good — and when the guy who made the record is the one running cleanup on it, that’s not humility. That’s a confession.
Here’s what you should listen to instead. All 2005. All better.
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June 05, 2026 at 7:11 PM 1 min read
Edlan & Benito Diablo - Healing ft. Ella Hammill
Read more . . . →Liquicity has been the gold standard for emotional DnB for over a decade, and “Healing” is a textbook example of why. Edlan and Benito Diablo build a warm, rolling liquid track and then hand it to Ella Hammill, whose voice does most of the heavy lifting and earns the title honestly. The song actually sounds like its name, which matters more than it should. The drums roll instead of stomp, the bassline glows rather than crushes, and the whole thing wraps around you like the first warm day after a long winter. I know “liquid DnB on Liquicity” is the least surprising sentence I could write, but there’s a reason the formula keeps working when the right people execute it. This is comfort music with a pulse, the stuff you reach for when life has been a lot and you need a song that’s on your side. Ella Hammill is...
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June 05, 2026 at 6:23 PM 1 min read
THEMBA x DJ Kent x David Morales - Alegria
Read more . . . →Three legends converging on one track is either peak collab or peak ego, and THEMBA x DJ Kent x David Morales’s “Alegria” thankfully lands in the former category. Armada got this one and it feels right — there’s a warmth and a lift to it that matches the label’s energy. The afro-house influence THEMBA always brings meshes surprisingly well with Morales’s classic house DNA, and DJ Kent holds the whole thing together without anyone stepping on anyone else. “Alegria” means joy in several languages and the track earns that name honestly — it doesn’t just claim to be uplifting, it actually is. This is the kind of music that reminds you why you got into electronic music in the first place: not because it’s complicated or clever, but because it makes you feel something you weren’t feeling five minutes ago. Three names who could each headline on their own and...
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June 05, 2026 at 5:16 PM 1 min read
Don Jamal - Breaking Through
Read more . . . →The solo cut from the same DDD187 release and it hits differently without the Crastinate collab context — more stripped back, still heavy. Don Jamal clearly had a lot to say this release and “Breaking Through” is the more direct version of it.
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