Why does music this aggressive make me this happy? “Nobody Around” is Rival, Biometrix and CRVN piling into one track and refusing to leave anything on the table. It’s a bass-heavy, mid-tempo stomp with a vocal that turns brattier every time it circles back, and a drop that hits like a car door slamming in the best possible way. Three producers on one tune usually means a pile of competing ideas, and instead this feels weirdly focused, everyone pulling in the same nasty direction at once. The bass in the second drop has a metallic snarl to it that I keep rewinding just to feel my headphones flex. It’s dumb fun, full stop, which is exactly the mood some days demand. I played it walking to the store and nearly missed my turn. Not every track needs to mean something, and this one is proof you can get by on...
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August 27, 2026 at 9:25 PM 1 min read
Rival, Biometrix, CRVN - Nobody Around
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August 27, 2026 at 3:39 PM 1 min read
Oden & Fatzo x Noa Milee - You Don't Want To Think About It
Read more . . . →Oden & Fatzo have basically cracked the cheat code for a certain kind of house track. “You Don’t Want To Think About It” with Noa Milee is exactly what the title promises: a groove built to switch your brain off and your hips on. The bassline is that fat, slightly cheeky Oden & Fatzo signature, the one that always sounds like it’s smirking at you, and Noa Milee’s vocal loops over the top just enough to lodge in your skull for the rest of the day. At 1:15 the whole thing snaps into the pocket and flatly refuses to leave, riding one idea for a gorgeous stretch instead of piling new ones on top. That confidence is the trick; lesser producers panic around now and jam in a breakdown. This one trusts the groove to hold you, and it does. I caught myself moving before I’d consciously decided to. Peak-time...
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August 27, 2026 at 2:06 PM 1 min read
Public Consultation
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August 27, 2026 at 11:14 AM 1 min read
NGHTMRE & Jordin Sparks - No Air
Read more . . . →Remember crying to “No Air” in 2008? NGHTMRE just turned it into a festival weapon and somehow kept the heartbreak intact. Getting Jordin Sparks herself back on the hook is the move that makes this work — it would have been so easy to chop the old vocal and call it a flip, and instead she re-sings it with seventeen more years of weight sitting in her voice. NGHTMRE builds the first half like a proper pop record, all space and tension, letting that famous melody breathe before he detonates it. The drop is huge and bass-forward without ever burying her, a wide rubbery low end that hits like trap and bass music raised a very loud kid together. What surprises me is the back half; he resists doing it twice as hard the second time, which just about every other producer alive would have. This is nostalgia bait made...
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August 27, 2026 at 7:30 AM
1 min read
$133 Billion and a Three-Minute Call
Read more . . . →Microsoft posted $133.7 billion in net profit this year. Up thirty-one percent. Then they fired 3,200 Xbox workers, some of them in three-minute phone calls from Montreal. Fifth round of layoffs in three years. The gaming division pulled in $21.8 billion and added two hundred million players. The people who built the games those players showed up for got a call shorter than a cigarette break telling them September is their last month. Hundreds of those workers are CWA union members who just organized and are fighting for first contracts. Microsoft started cutting while negotiations were still open. The union filed unfair labor practice charges with the NLRB. Workers held “Save Our Devs” rallies in nine cities this month. Microsoft held an earnings call. The company cleared a hundred and thirty-three billion dollars in profit and decided the people who make the product are the cost to cut. The earnings...
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August 26, 2026 at 8:15 PM 1 min read
Makoto, Gabriella Bongo, PVC & Blocksberg - Better Days
Read more . . . →This one made the whole afternoon feel about ten degrees warmer. “Better Days” gathers Makoto, Gabriella Bongo, PVC and Blocksberg into a piece of soulful liquid dnb that sounds less produced than grown. Makoto has been making music this warm since before half the current scene owned a laptop, and you can hear that lived-in quality in every bar, the ease of someone with nothing left to prove. Gabriella Bongo’s vocal is the heart of it, soulful without a scrap of showing off, riding these breaks like she’s been singing over them her whole life. The drums roll with a genuine live-drummer swing, brushed and loose where a lot of liquid goes clinical and quantized. At 2:05 the low end opens into this deep, buttery sub-bass you feel in your ribs first, and it never once tips into aggression, just holds the whole thing up from below. There’s real instrumentation...
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August 26, 2026 at 5:08 PM 1 min read
Both Sides
Read more . . . →Cable news finally booked a guest who disagrees with him.
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August 26, 2026 at 3:32 PM 1 min read
Inner City x LOSTBOYJAY - Good Life
Read more . . . →I was on a crowded train when the vocal came in and I involuntarily smiled at a stranger, which is a lot to ask of a Tuesday commute. “Good Life” is one of the foundational records of dance music, Inner City’s 1988 Detroit anthem that basically taught house how to be joyful, and LOSTBOYJAY has taken on the nerve-wracking job of updating it. Reworking a track this sacred is a minefield, because the original is perfect and everyone over forty has a memory bolted to it. The good news is he treats it with obvious respect. Paris Grey’s original vocal, that impossibly warm ‘let it all come and go’ hook, stays front and center, and around it LOSTBOYJAY builds a bigger, more modern trance-leaning production for a 2026 floor. At 1:40 the drop opens into a wide, arms-up synth line that keeps the euphoria of the original while handing a...
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August 26, 2026 at 2:00 PM 5 min read
Big Beat, Explained: When Dance Music Got a Mohawk
Big beat explained: the mid-90s British dance music of Chemical Brothers, Fatboy Slim and The Prodigy, built on distorted breakbeats and zero subtlety.Read more . . . →Get the tee →Support the blogWhat if your laundry was also a personality? -
August 26, 2026 at 11:07 AM 1 min read
IMANU & A Girl Named Sue - All U Need
Read more . . . →How is IMANU this far ahead of everyone and still not a household name? “All U Need” with A Girl Named Sue is him doing the thing almost nobody else in dnb pulls off, which is making a track feel weightless and crushing inside the same eight bars. It opens delicate, her vocal floating over a few processed chords, and you brace for a straightforward liquid tune. Then the low end arrives and it’s this warped, elastic bass that bends in directions your ear can’t predict, closer to a sound-design experiment than a standard reese. A Girl Named Sue is a perfect foil for it, her voice human and unbothered while the production glitches and stutters around her. What gets me is the restraint; IMANU could bury this in detail and instead leaves air everywhere, letting single sounds ring out and decay in their own time. The drop lands and...
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