The bass hit at the first drop physically moved the air in my room, which is about the highest praise I can give a trap tune. Euphoria pairs Deadcrow’s murky, half-time sensibility with Caster’s harder edge, and the result lands somewhere between a Trap Nation banger and something you’d hear in a much darker room. The name is a bit of a fake-out, because this isn’t euphoric so much as menacing, all detuned bass growls and a beat that stalks rather than bounces. The vocal chops are pitched into something almost ghostly, floating over the low end like they’re not sure they want to be there. At 1:35 the whole thing drops into double-time for about eight bars and it’s genuinely disorienting in the best way, like the track briefly forgot which genre it was. I’ve had the main drop on loop trying to figure out how the sub sits...
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July 04, 2026 at 10:42 AM 1 min read
Deadcrow & Caster - Euphoria
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July 04, 2026 at 6:42 AM
1 min read
Chevron Bought a $53 Billion Company. The Bill Went to 8,000 Workers.
Read more . . . →Chevron is cutting up to 8,000 jobs — a fifth of its people — to save $3 billion. Keep that number in your head, because two months ago the same company closed a $53 billion deal to swallow Hess, and this year it’s shovelling $20 billion into share buybacks, five billion a quarter, like clockwork. So the math was never tight. Chevron has never had more money to move around. It just decided the cheapest place to find three billion dollars was the payroll, and CEO Mike Wirth called it “stronger long-term competitiveness,” which is executive for “you, specifically, are the cost.” That’s the part they’d rather you not sit with. A $3 billion cut is a rounding error next to a $53 billion acquisition and a $20 billion buyback program. They could have found it anywhere. They found it in 8,000 households because those are the households that don’t...
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July 04, 2026 at 6:39 AM 1 min read
Don Diablo - Elephant
Read more . . . →Don Diablo basically invented future house as a commercial force, so it’s interesting to hear him in 2026 still chasing the sound he helped codify, and Elephant suggests he’s not done refining it. The track is built on a metallic, slightly aggressive lead that stomps with the heft the title promises. He’s always had a knack for melodies that are catchy and a little melancholy at once, and that bittersweet quality is here under the festival sheen. The drop is more restrained than his early stuff, trading some of the plucky brightness for a darker, weightier stomp that suits where dance music has drifted. I’ve never been the biggest Don Diablo evangelist, but there’s a craftsmanship to his production that’s hard to argue with even when the songs don’t fully land for me. This one mostly lands. The build into the second drop has a genuine sense of drama, holding...
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July 03, 2026 at 11:38 PM 1 min read
Grum - You Make Me Feel
Read more . . . →Chopped and stretched until it stops being words, the vocal on You Make Me Feel becomes pure texture, and that processing is the smartest decision on the whole track. Grum has settled so completely into the Anjunabeats sound that he’s now one of the people defining it, that gleaming melodic-house-meets-trance hybrid the label made its signature. It rides a bassline that pulses with real forward motion under a melody designed to go straight for the emotional jugular. It’s euphoric without being naive about it, the kind of build that knows exactly how to delay gratification before the release at 2:30 pays everything off. I have a soft spot for this corner of dance music, the unashamedly pretty end of it, and Grum is operating near the top of that game. The production is crystalline, every element placed with obvious care. It’s the sort of track that sounds incredible at sunset...
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July 03, 2026 at 6:40 PM 1 min read
BCee & Javeon - What You're Missing
Read more . . . →Some drum and bass is built for the 3am peak and some is built for the taxi home, and What You’re Missing is firmly the second kind. BCee has spent two decades making liquid that actually feels like something instead of just rolling pleasantly in the background, and pairing him with Javeon’s voice was never going to miss. The vocal sits right up front, warm and a little melancholy, while the break underneath does that classic Spearhead thing where it’s technical without ever showing off. There’s a moment at 2:10 where the pads drop out and it’s just Javeon and a sub, and it caught me off guard the first time enough that I rewound it. This is grown-up dnb, the kind you can put on around people who claim they don’t like the genre and watch them quietly change their mind. It won’t rearrange your organs and it isn’t...
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July 03, 2026 at 4:49 PM 1 min read
Ishimaru & Trevizan - Take Control
Read more . . . →There’s a piano line buried in the back half of Take Control that does more emotional work than the entire front half combined, and it’s the reason this one stuck. Ishimaru & Trevizan keep things deceptively simple, a rolling house groove and a vocal that repeats its way into your skull, but that piano is the hook that turns a functional dancefloor tool into something you actually remember the next morning. STMPD has a house sound at this point, polished and slightly euphoric, and this fits the mould while still feeling like the work of people rather than a brand guideline. The groove is patient, content to lock in and ride rather than constantly reinventing itself, which is exactly what you want from house at 1am. It builds without ever feeling like it’s straining for a moment. I put it on while cooking and realised I’d played it three times...
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July 03, 2026 at 2:15 PM 1 min read
ANUQRAM & Anfulage - Sonderwave
Read more . . . →There’s a synth arpeggio that comes in around 1:50 that I could listen to for an hour on its own, and Sonderwave is smart enough to build the whole back half around it. This is Anjunabeats doing modern trance the way the label has basically perfected, all soaring melody and a build that takes its sweet time getting where it’s going. ANUQRAM and Anfulage keep the euphoria on a tight leash for the first two minutes, layering pads and teasing the melody before finally letting it fly. When the drop hits it’s pure uplift, the kind of hands-in-the-air moment trance has been chasing since the nineties and still occasionally nails. The production is crystalline, every element given room to breathe, which is exactly what this style needs to avoid turning to mush. Modern trance gets accused of being emotionally manipulative, and honestly, guilty, but when it’s done this well I’m...
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July 03, 2026 at 2:00 PM 4 min read
Burial: The Ghost Who Defined a Decade
Who is Burial and why does Untrue still own UK electronic music? William Bevan made the saddest dance record of the decade — and nobody's matched it.Read more . . . →Get the tee →Support the blogThree words. One opinion. Cotton. -
July 03, 2026 at 12:24 PM 1 min read
Kbob - Let's Go
Read more . . . →Let’s Go is built on a synth arp that burrows into your brain around the one-minute mark and refuses to leave, which is exactly the kind of patient, hypnotic progression mau5trap built its reputation on. Kbob understands that progressive house lives or dies on the gradual reveal, the way a track adds one element at a time until you look up and realise it’s become enormous without any single obvious drop. There’s a deadmau5 influence all over the melodic sensibility here, that cold and precise prettiness, but Kbob brings enough of his own personality that it never feels like an impression. The track takes its time, content to simmer for two full minutes before it shows its hand. When the main melody finally arrives in full it lands with real weight precisely because of that restraint. This is headphones-and-a-long-walk music as much as it’s club music. The low end is...
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July 03, 2026 at 11:38 AM
1 min read
The Fake Cat Nobody Could Switch Off
Read more . . . →On Friday June 12, at 5:21pm ET, the US government handed Anthropic an export-control directive: cut off Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for any foreign national, anywhere, in the country or out, including Anthropic’s own foreign-national staff. You can’t check the passport of hundreds of millions of users in real time, so Anthropic did the only compliant thing and pulled both models for everybody. Its statement pinned it on “the US government, citing national security authorities.” NBC named Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and the Bureau of Industry and Security; Bloomberg later published the letter. Anthropic says it disagrees and chalks the whole thing up to a misunderstanding. It notes the same capability is sitting in other models anyway, OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 included, and swears it’ll restore access as soon as it can. It stayed dark for weeks. That same week, look what the internet did. A pile of people on X...
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