“Bang” is a lot more fun than a track this moody has any right to be. UPxMT thread a nervy little synth riff through the whole thing and then keep interrupting it with a drop that stutters and cuts out like a bad connection, and somehow the glitchiness is the hook. It sits in that CloudKid pocket where indie songwriting meets electronic production without either one winning, which is a hard balance and they nail it. The best moment is around 2:10 when everything drops to just the vocal and a single pulsing bass note before the last chorus kicks the door back in. There’s a real song buried in here, not simply a beat with a topline stapled on. The melody would survive being played on an acoustic guitar, which is the test most of this stuff fails. I keep replaying the last thirty seconds. It’s edgy without being...
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July 18, 2026 at 2:22 PM 1 min read
UPxMT - Bang
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July 18, 2026 at 12:31 PM 1 min read
Stacey Pullen - I Wanna Dance (Extended Mix)
Read more . . . →Detroit veterans do not make music for your phone speaker, and Stacey Pullen’s “I Wanna Dance” is a nine-minute reminder of what a record built for a real room feels like. The extended mix takes its sweet time — you’re two and a half minutes in before the vocal even shows up — and that patience is the entire pleasure. Pullen has been doing this since the Belleville days and it shows in how little he panics; the track trusts a single hypnotic groove to carry you, adding a hi-hat here, a filter sweep there, never once begging for attention. The bassline is round and rubbery and sits so deep in the pocket you feel it more than hear it. Somewhere past the six-minute mark it locks into a trance-state loop that I completely lost track of time inside. This is house as meditation, not as content. Modern producers cramming...
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July 18, 2026 at 10:42 AM 1 min read
WHIPPED CREAM - home was always me (remixes)
Read more . . . →What happens when a producer known for absolutely caving your chest in decides to make something soft? WHIPPED CREAM’s “home was always me” gets the remix treatment here, and the whole package leans into the tender side of an artist who usually deals in damage. Caroline Cecil built her name on trap and bass heavy enough to crack a windshield, so hearing these versions unfold into warm, lo-fi, almost weightless territory is a genuine turn. The Monstercat-meets-Chillhop framing tells you the temperature: muted drums, tape hiss, chords that just sort of exhale. There’s a remix in the set where the beat doesn’t fully drop until past the halfway mark, and the restraint is the whole point. It trusts you to sit in the quiet. I had this on doing dishes at midnight and lost ten minutes staring out the window, which is exactly what this kind of thing is for....
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July 18, 2026 at 8:23 AM
1 min read
It's here. Tomorrowland weekend one opens today.
Read more . . . →This is it. Weekend one opens today, David Guetta and Martin Garrix and Calvin Harris are somewhere over Belgium right now, and 200,000 people are about to pretend they didn’t pay a fortune to stand in a field. Say what you want about Tomorrowland, the mainstage singalong at golden hour is a real thing that does real damage to whatever cynicism you showed up with. Three tracks built for exactly the moment when the whole field sings the same line back. 1. Axwell Λ Ingrosso - More Than You Know Two-thirds of Swedish House Mafia in their solo years, and this is the one that proved they didn’t need the third guy to write a stadium chorus. That vocal hook is a machine. The video was literally shot at their own festival set, which tells you exactly what it was made for. 2. Kygo - Firestone The track that made...
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July 18, 2026 at 6:39 AM 1 min read
MUST DIE! - BLOODBATH AND BEYOND
Read more . . . →MUST DIE! spent years being the guy other producers quietly ripped off, and this whole record is him collecting the debt. The title track wastes about forty seconds on a fake-out intro that sounds almost pretty before the first drop caves the floor in around 0:48. What gets me is how dry the low end is — no reverb smear, no wash, just a bass patch that hits like someone slamming a car door in an empty garage. I had it on in the kitchen and physically stopped chopping vegetables to check my speakers weren’t broken. He’s always written this cartoon-horror flavour of dubstep and here it finally sounds expensive instead of cheap. The back half introduces a second-drop switch-up that most producers would have saved for a whole other song, which tells you he’s not rationing ideas anymore. Nothing about it is subtle and I don’t want it to...
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July 18, 2026 at 6:32 AM
1 min read
Record Buybacks, Record Insider Selling. Do the Math.
Read more . . . →In July, S&P 500 companies announced $166 billion in stock buybacks — the biggest July on record. That’s the corporate treasury spending shareholder money to hoover up its own shares and tell everyone the stock is a bargain too good to pass up. So here’s the number they’d rather not put in the same sentence: the executives signing off on those buybacks sold $77.6 billion of their own stock in the first half of the year, the second-fastest insider selling pace in more than two decades. With their own cash, those same insiders bought back $6.9 billion. They sold roughly eleven dollars of stock for every one they were willing to buy. If the shares were the steal the buyback is pretending they are, the people who know the company best would be backing up the truck, not sprinting for the exit. A buyback isn’t a vote of confidence —...
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July 17, 2026 at 11:38 PM 1 min read
Melé - Soul Makossa
Read more . . . →Sampling “Soul Makossa” in 2026 takes some nerve, given Manu Dibango’s original has already been looted by everyone from Michael Jackson to Rihanna. Melé’s version earns the theft by treating it as a proper house workout instead of a lazy interpolation — that famous “mama-ko” chant gets chopped, pitched, and ridden over a stripped kick that Defected could bottle and sell. The groove is deceptively simple; there’s maybe four elements in the mix at any given moment, and the space between them is where all the swing actually lives. It hit its stride for me around the three-minute mark when a second percussion layer sneaks in and the whole thing tilts from “nice” to “why am I standing up.” Melé has always understood that a good house record is about restraint, about knowing which one thing to add next and when. This is peak-time material that never once tries too...
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July 17, 2026 at 6:40 PM 1 min read
Zenar - Te conocí
Read more . . . →“Te conocí” is unashamedly built for a beach at 6pm with a drink in your hand. Zenar wraps a Spanish-language vocal around a bouncy, sunlit dance beat and lets the hook do all the work. And what a hook: the kind of melody you’ll be humming after one listen whether you speak the language or not, with a drop at 1:10 that keeps the vocal front and centre instead of burying it under a synth stab. There’s a plucky little riff that answers the vocal line back and forth like a conversation. None of it is deep, and it doesn’t need to be. This is pure serotonin, engineered to make a crowd of strangers grin at each other. Spinnin has turned this exact formula into chart numbers for years, and every so often one of them actually connects the way it’s supposed to. This is one of those. It’ll be...
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July 17, 2026 at 4:49 PM 1 min read
Marc Kiss x Yasmin Hutchins - I Love You Always Forever
Read more . . . →Covering Donna Lewis’s “I Love You Always Forever” as a trance record is either a war crime or a stroke of genius, and I’ve decided it’s the second one. That 1996 chorus is pure sugar and it turns out it was secretly engineered all along for a big euphoric build — Yasmin Hutchins sells the vocal with total sincerity and never once plays it as a nostalgia gag. Marc Kiss keeps the arrangement patient, holding the drop back until you’re genuinely aching for it, then falling into a clean supersaw wash that would light up any main stage on earth. It’s completely shameless and I don’t care, because it commits so fully that the cynicism just falls away somewhere in the first minute. I caught the exact second the melody clicked into place and physically grinned, alone, at my desk. Guilty-pleasure dance music only feels guilty if you actually let...
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July 17, 2026 at 2:15 PM 1 min read
ZKG - Right Here
Read more . . . →“Right Here” has more bite than the label it’s on usually gets credit for. NCS tracks get written off as gaming-stream wallpaper, and ZKG mostly ignores that ceiling: this is built around a catchy vocal hook, sure, but the drop earns its keep with a punchy, mid-tempo bass groove and a lead that snaps rather than soars. It’s clean, radio-ready electronic pop with just enough grit in the low end to keep it from floating away. The best bit is the second drop at 2:05, where a counter-melody sneaks in over the top and gives the whole thing a lift the first drop was holding back. I won’t pretend it’s reinventing anything; it’s doing a familiar job competently and with real energy, which is more than most of its NCS neighbours manage. Free to use, easy to like, and it’ll live in a thousand videos. Genuinely decent for what it...
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