The first thing you hear is a bassline that sounds like it’s being physically wrung out, and from there WATCIS! basically never lets your ears settle. This is Monstercat in full aggressive-dnb mode, all snapping breaks and a low end designed to test whatever you’re playing it on. KRITIKAL’s sound design here is genuinely nasty in the good way, every hit placed with the precision of someone who spent too long in the studio and enjoyed every minute. The drop at 0:52 does a stuttering, glitched-out thing that shouldn’t be danceable and absolutely is. What keeps it from being pure noise is the swing underneath, that little bit of groove that heavy dnb usually forgets to bring. I’ve had the second drop stuck in my head all afternoon, which is not something I can usually say about tracks this abrasive. Aggressive electronic music lives or dies on whether it grooves,...
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July 06, 2026 at 3:39 PM 1 min read
KRITIKAL - WATCIS!
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July 06, 2026 at 3:31 PM 1 min read
ARTO - Lost in Cancún
Read more . . . →Lost in Cancún sounds exactly like its title, which I mean as a genuine compliment. ARTO delivers a slice of melodic trance for Armada that’s all sun-bleached euphoria and forward motion, the kind of track made for the exact moment the sun comes up over a festival and everyone silently agrees to stay for one more. The lead melody is huge and grinning, a supersaw riff that builds across a full minute before the drop at 1:40 sends it skyward, and trance lives and dies on whether that release actually delivers — this one does. There’s a plucked arpeggio running underneath that keeps the whole thing propulsive even during the softer stretches, and the breakdown swaps euphoria for something almost tender before winding the tension back up. It’s not doing anything the genre hasn’t done for twenty years, and it doesn’t need to, because when the formula works it’s one...
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July 06, 2026 at 2:00 PM 3 min read
Every Festival Lineup Is the Same Eight Names
Every festival headliner is the same eight names because the top of the poster is a spreadsheet. The undercard is where the fun actually is.Read more . . . →Subscribe →Weekly digestWhat you missed this week, minus the corporate emo. -
July 06, 2026 at 12:09 PM 1 min read
Argy x Paul Oakenfold x Planet Perfecto Knights - ResuRection
Read more . . . →That main riff is one of the most famous melodies in trance history — Planet Perfecto’s ‘Resurrection’ has been detonating rooms since 1999 — and hearing Argy drag it into 2026 is a genuinely clever bit of time travel. He rebuilds the anthem on a modern melodic-techno chassis, slowing the frenzy of the original into something more hypnotic and letting Oakenfold’s involvement bless the whole endeavour. The famous lead still does its thing, but now it floats over a rolling, rubbery bassline instead of a jackhammer trance kick, and the update mostly works. Around 2:20 the riff finally arrives in full and the hair on my arms genuinely stood up, which is the entire reason to remake a classic. There’s a risk with this kind of thing that you just ride the nostalgia and add nothing, and Argy sidesteps it by making the groove genuinely his own rather than just...
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July 06, 2026 at 11:14 AM 1 min read
Inner City - Pennies From Heaven (DJ Paulette In For a Pennies Remix)
Read more . . . →Hearing Inner City again in 2026 does something to my chest I wasn’t prepared for. Pennies From Heaven is a piece of Detroit history, Kevin Saunderson and Paris Grey’s fingerprints all over the original, and DJ Paulette’s remix treats it with exactly the right mix of reverence and irreverence. She keeps Grey’s vocal front and center, because you’d be an idiot not to, and rebuilds the floor underneath into something that would work in a Manchester basement at 2am today. The bassline has that rolling, warm quality that modern house spends fortunes trying to recreate and rarely nails. What Paulette understands is that you don’t remix a classic to prove you can improve it, you do it to introduce it to people who missed it the first time. The breakdown around 3:00 strips it back to just the vocal and a kick, and it’s a genuine goosebumps moment. Thirty-odd years...
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July 06, 2026 at 11:09 AM
1 min read
Tomorrowland is 11 days out and the internet has lost its mind
Read more . . . →Tomorrowland kicks off in Boom in eleven days, and the internet has already decided it’s the greatest thing to ever happen to a Belgian field. Two weekends, sixteen stages, five hundred names, one castle-shaped mainstage that costs more than most people’s houses. You don’t need a €500 ticket to hear the tracks that’ll actually run the place, though. Here’s the pre-game: the songs the Mainstage will lean on before Guetta pretends he built them from scratch. 1. Martin Garrix - Animals The one that turned a Dutch teenager into a headliner. That three-note lead still detonates a crowd on contact, and the drop at 1:07 is the exact moment festival EDM stopped pretending to be subtle. Garrix has spent a decade trying to write something bigger and mostly missed, which tells you how hard this one landed. 2. David Guetta & Bebe Rexha - I’m Good (Blue) Yes, it’s a...
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July 06, 2026 at 9:32 AM 1 min read
501 - The Final Cut (Chime Remix)
Read more . . . →What happens when a dnb producer hands a track to someone who lives at 140? You get The Final Cut in Chime’s hands, and the answer is: it gets meaner and slower and somehow more urgent. 501’s original was rolling neurofunk, all forward momentum, and Chime drags it down into dubstep territory without losing the aggression that made it work — if anything the halved tempo gives every bass growl more room to actually land on your chest. Chime came up making melodic stuff and has been getting progressively filthier release by release, and this is him fully committed to the dark side. The first drop at 1:25 hits with this detuned, almost seasick wobble that keeps sliding just out of tune before snapping back, which is a horrible sensation and I mean that as the highest compliment. There’s a real craft to making a bassline feel physically wrong on...
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July 06, 2026 at 7:36 AM
1 min read
Volkswagen Lost China. 100,000 Workers Get the Bill.
Read more . . . →Volkswagen wants to cut up to 100,000 jobs and shut four German plants — the biggest restructuring in the company’s 89-year history, roughly one in seven of everyone who works there. The sites on the chopping block, including Zwickau, Hanover, Emden, and Audi’s factory in Neckarsulm, employ more than 45,000 people between them. And the reason a worker in Emden is about to lose the thing his whole town is built around? Management got beaten in China. BYD and the other homegrown brands ate VW’s lunch, sales in its single biggest market fell 20 percent in one quarter, and the people who made every one of those strategic calls are still sitting in Wolfsburg with their jobs intact. Here’s the part they’ll skate past: Volkswagen is not dying. It cleared €1.56 billion in net profit last quarter. Down from the year before, sure — but €1.56 billion in three months...
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July 05, 2026 at 8:15 PM 1 min read
IKU - OBS3SS3D W U
Read more . . . →The spelling alone tells you this isn’t taking itself too seriously, and OBS3SS3D W U is all the better for it. IKU makes the kind of melodic trap that lives on the border of hyperpop, glitchy and bright and unafraid of a big, sugary vocal. The whole track is built around a chopped-up love-song sample that gets more mangled every time it comes around, until by the final drop it’s barely words at all, just texture. The drop at 1:15 is where it clicks, a skittering, detuned mess that somehow resolves into something you can actually move to. This is internet music in the purest sense, made by and for people who grew up with a hundred browser tabs open and no attention span left. It should be exhausting and it’s weirdly charming instead. I keep coming back to that mangled vocal, which is the sign of a producer who...
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July 05, 2026 at 3:32 PM 1 min read
Friction - Stay
Read more . . . →How is Friction still this consistent this far into a career most producers would have coasted on by now? Stay is another clean, high-gloss roller from a guy who’s been a fixture on Radio 1 and behind Shogun Audio for what feels like forever, and it moves with the confidence of someone who has nothing left to prove. The vocal hook is simple to the point of being almost too clean, but the break underneath has real snap, the kind of crisp engineering that makes you notice your headphones are working. The switch at 1:45 into a heavier second half is where it earns its keep, dropping the polish for a bassline with actual teeth. I appreciate a producer who can make something this radio-ready and still slip a filthy second drop past the gatekeepers. It’s not reinventing the wheel, but the wheel is round for a reason and Friction...
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