Proper trance, no notes. Lucca Saettone’s “Take Me Deeper” is the uplifting, arms-in-the-air kind, built on a lead melody that goes straight for the part of your brain that peaked at a festival in 2009 and never came down. The build is patient in the way good trance has to be, layering elements one at a time until the breakdown strips it to a single plucked line and a wash of pads. Then the drop, and the drop is the entire reason. That soaring supersaw lead is pure emotional blackmail and I fold for it every single time. There’s nothing ironic or self-aware anywhere in it, which after years of everything being too clever by half feels almost radical. This is the sound of sincerity that never went out of fashion for the people who never stopped loving it in the first place. Armada is still the home for this...
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August 08, 2026 at 7:05 PM 1 min read
Lucca Saettone - Take Me Deeper
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August 08, 2026 at 2:22 PM 1 min read
Nero & Taiki Nulight - We're Not Alone (ft. Emily Makis)
Read more . . . →I was three emails deep into a Tuesday afternoon when the drop on this hit and I lost the thread of the sentence I was writing. Nero making dubstep again feels like getting a postcard from 2011, back when “Welcome Reality” was the record every kid with a subwoofer wore out. “We’re Not Alone” has that exact cinematic-orchestral build they always did better than anyone, Emily Makis’s vocal soaring up over strings before the whole thing collapses into a bassline that sounds like a building coming down. It’s shameless and enormous and I don’t care one bit. The production is glossier than the old stuff, a little more Hollywood, but the DNA is intact: the tension in the breakdown, the way the drop feels earned instead of just scheduled. There’s a half-second of total silence right before it lands that made me hold my breath the first time through. I’d...
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August 08, 2026 at 12:31 PM 1 min read
Voltage, Yung Saber & Doktor - Buss One
Read more . . . →When did Hospital Records start putting out music this rowdy? “Buss One” is a long way from the label’s liquid-and-lovely reputation, a jump-up-leaning roller with Yung Saber and Doktor on MC duties that sounds built for a rig rather than a living room. Voltage handles the production and the bassline is a properly gnarly thing, growling and rolling in equal measure, the sort that pulls that involuntary screwface out of people. The MCs bring a raw, half-shouted energy that most polished dnb is too shy to include these days, and it’s the best call on the whole track. This is dance music with dirt under its nails. I love that a label plenty of people file under “coffee-table drum and bass” put this out with a completely straight face. It’s got the pirate-radio, sweaty-basement spirit that a lot of modern dnb sands right off in the name of festival cleanliness....
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August 08, 2026 at 10:42 AM 1 min read
Nova Blue & EV - Weekend Cinderella
Read more . . . →A good house vocal can make even a hardened cynic want to text an ex, and “Weekend Cinderella” is armed with one. Nova Blue and EV’s track is bright, bouncy vocal house with a hook that moved into my head rent-free inside one listen. It rides a piano-driven groove and a topline about exactly what the title implies, that specific magic of a night out you already know won’t survive contact with Monday morning. The production is clean and warm, a rolling bassline under a vocal that’s belted rather than whispered, which is the correct call for music this unapologetically fun. There’s a key change late in the track that I clocked immediately and grinned at, because a well-deployed key change is one of pop’s oldest cheap thrills and it still works on me every time. This is the kind of house that doesn’t need the big serious clubs, just...
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August 08, 2026 at 10:14 AM
1 min read
Two Records, No Connection
Read more . . . →If you only have ten minutes today, spend them on these two. They share no DNA. One went number one in three countries, the other cracked Beatport’s top 100 from a label most people can’t name. Both of them own a piece of this summer from opposite ends. 1. Adam Port & Stryv ft. Malachiii - Move You hear this once in a bar and then it follows you home. Malachiii’s vocal sits on a rhythm that splits the difference between Afrobeats and melodic house, and standing still to it is physically unreasonable. It went to number one in Belgium, Portugal, and Switzerland, which is a bizarre geographic spread until you hear it and realise the groove was always going to work everywhere. It’s been the song of every rooftop and every taxi ride with a driver who has taste for over a year now, and it’s still going. 2....
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August 08, 2026 at 6:39 AM 1 min read
V. Christie - Say You Love Me
Read more . . . →The first thing you hear is a vocal sample flipped so hard it takes a second to register there’s a human under there, and that little disorientation is the hook before the actual hook arrives. V. Christie builds “Say You Love Me” around that chopped voice, pitching and stretching it until it’s basically another synth, and the effect is genuinely lovely — pop songwriting smuggled inside a dancefloor track. About a minute in the drums finally commit and it turns into a proper future-bass-leaning banger, all wide chords and a warm wobble sitting on the low mids. This is another NCS find, and it’s proof the label’s roster has come a long way from its early days of interchangeable drop fodder. The way the vocal keeps mutating means you never quite get bored of the same three words. I’ve had “say you love me” stuck in my head for two...
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August 08, 2026 at 6:11 AM
1 min read
Walmart Gets $2.4 Billion Back. You Get the Receipt.
Read more . . . →Walmart just got a $2.4 billion refund check from the federal government. Apple got $2.19 billion. Amazon, $600 million. Ford, $1.3 billion. Your refund: zero. Trump spent two years collecting $166 billion in tariffs that the Supreme Court ruled were illegal, and now the money is flowing back — to the corporations that filed the customs paperwork. You paid the markup at the register for two straight years. You ate the price hikes on everything from groceries to sneakers. The refund process is designed so that only the “importer of record” can claim a cent. You were never the importer of record. You were the customer. He floated $2,000 checks for Americans when the tariff money was rolling in. That was the pitch — we’re collecting so much from foreign countries we can send you a check. The Supreme Court killed the tariffs. The government started writing refund checks. And...
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August 07, 2026 at 11:38 PM 1 min read
Tape B & Dani King - Underneath Your Skin
Read more . . . →Tape B is having the kind of run where you stop being surprised and start being suspicious. “Underneath Your Skin” pairs his heavy, gummy bass design with Dani King’s vocal, and the contrast is the whole reason it lands: her voice stays soft and close while the low end underneath is doing something genuinely rude. Most bass producers who bring in a singer treat her like a garnish sitting on top of the drop. Here the vocal is load-bearing, the thing the bass is answering to. When the second half opens up, the sub doesn’t just get louder, it gets wider, like the room grew walls you didn’t know were there. I’ve had this on repeat since Thursday and the part that keeps getting me is the little half-second of silence right before the weight comes back. Tape B has spent the last couple of years turning into one of...
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August 07, 2026 at 6:40 PM 1 min read
Vizzen - BOUNCE!
Read more . . . →The title is the entire instruction manual. Vizzen’s “BOUNCE!” is UK bass built for one purpose, and it gets there around the first drop, which lands like a trampoline with a personal vendetta. This is that springy, rubbery bass-house sound the UK does so well, where the low end pogos, all spring and no dead weight. The vocal is chopped into a single repeated syllable that turns into its own percussion. What gets me is how much space is in the mix: there’s room to breathe between the bass stabs, so each one lands clean instead of smearing into mud. It’s a peak-time weapon, the kind of track a DJ drops to reset a room from zero to feral in about eight bars. Monstercat’s UK-bass output has gotten genuinely nasty lately and this sits near the top of the pile. Great gym music too, if yours lets you make a...
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August 07, 2026 at 4:49 PM 1 min read
Tantrum Desire - Lift You Up (ft. Gracie Van Brunt)
Read more . . . →There’s a moment near the two-thirds mark where the drums drop out entirely and Gracie Van Brunt’s vocal hangs alone for a bar before Tantrum Desire slam everything back in, and it’s the best three seconds on the track. “Lift You Up” is festival drum and bass made by people who’ve been engineering it long enough to make it look effortless. The build is enormous, the drop is bright and clean, and Van Brunt’s topline is exactly the kind of thing ten thousand people scream back without ever learning the verse. Tantrum Desire have a real gift for the euphoric side of dnb that never tips into cheese, which is a narrow beam to walk. This one stays firmly on the right side of it. The low end has actual grit under all the sparkle, so it hits your body and not only your feelings. I put it on during...
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