Hedex makes the kind of drum and bass that does not care whether you think it’s cool, and Beat On My Drum is a perfect example. Inéz’s vocal is the hook the whole thing hangs on — big, bright, designed to be screamed back at a festival at an unreasonable hour. Underneath it the drums roll with that relentless 174 momentum that makes you miss your turnoff and feel fine about it. This is dancefloor DnB with zero interest in being understated, and honestly that’s a lane that needs more good drivers right now. It would be easy to write something this anthemic off as obvious, except the production is genuinely tight and the energy never sags across the back half where a lesser track would coast. I had it stuck in my head before the first chorus even finished, which almost never happens to me with jump-up. Sometimes you...
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June 30, 2026 at 11:14 AM 1 min read
Hedex - Beat On My Drum (ft. Inéz)
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June 30, 2026 at 10:42 AM 1 min read
SKALAH, Riko Dan - Thriller in Manila
Read more . . . →Riko Dan’s voice is one of those instruments that makes a track sound dangerous before a single bass note lands, and Thriller in Manila weaponises it from the first bar. SKALAH builds the whole thing around that menace, holding back until about the 1:10 mark and then dropping into a sub so low it stops being sound and becomes a physical problem for your room. This is dubstep in the old, mean sense, the kind that clears out anyone who wandered in expecting pretty melodies. The MC and producer combination is the secret here, because Riko keeps the energy criminal even in the gaps where a lesser vocalist would let the tension leak out. I’ve played the drop back four times trying to figure out what makes it hit so hard, and I think it’s that SKALAH refuses to layer anything decorative on top of it. No frills, no melodic...
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June 30, 2026 at 7:08 AM
2 min read
This Week on coldplaysucks — June 21–28
Read more . . . →Big week. House ran the table — tech house, deep house, disco house, the works — and for once I’m not mad about it. Drum and bass and dubstep split the heavy end down the middle, trance showed up to make grown adults cry on schedule, and somewhere in the mix a trance legend and a techno purist shared a Coachella stage and didn’t blow it up. Forty-one tracks. Not all of them are keepers, but the hit rate was better than it had any right to be. Track of the Week Armin van Buuren & Adam Beyer - No Mercy (Live @ Coachella 2026) On paper this is a stunt: a trance institution and one of techno’s most respected purists from opposite ends of dance music’s class system, sharing a stage. Then it clicks into place and you stop caring about the optics. The live cut carries an energy...
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June 30, 2026 at 7:08 AM
2 min read
They Found Forced Labor In 60 Countries The Same Week Their Tariffs Got Struck Down
Read more . . . →The Supreme Court threw out Trump’s “reciprocal” tariffs, so the administration needed a new doorway to walk the exact same policy back through, and on June 3 it found one: forced labor. The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative announced it had investigated 60 trading partners — China, Japan, the U.K., the EU, basically everyone — and discovered that all 60 of them fail to properly ban goods made with forced labor. Every single one, guilty. The proposed punishment is a tariff of 10 to 12.5 percent, which, by pure coincidence, lands almost exactly where the old illegal tariffs were sitting before the court killed them. Public Citizen did the math and pointed out that a serious forced-labor investigation of one country usually takes five to eighteen months. This one did sixty in just over two, and the findings read like a copy/paste with the country name swapped at the...
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June 29, 2026 at 9:31 PM 1 min read
MNK & RayRay - TECHNO BOY TECHNO GIRL
Read more . . . →A track called TECHNO BOY TECHNO GIRL is making a promise about how seriously it takes itself, and MNK & RayRay keep it. This is hard dance with its tongue firmly in its cheek — pounding, hyperactive, built for a crowd that wants to jump rather than nod thoughtfully at the back of the room. RayRay has always operated at the chaotic, colour-saturated end of the spectrum and this leans all the way in without flinching. It is absolutely not subtle, and pretending otherwise would miss the entire point; the fun lives in the relentlessness and the goofy vocal chant. The kick does most of the heavy lifting and it does not let up for a second, which is exactly what a track like this is for. It won’t soundtrack a moody after-hours set, and it isn’t trying to. It will, however, detonate a festival tent at peak time, and...
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June 29, 2026 at 6:40 PM 1 min read
Tujamo x Chester Young - PYRO
Read more . . . →PYRO is exactly as subtle as its title, which today is precisely what I wanted. Tujamo builds it for the front row and nowhere else, all coiled tension in the verse and then a drop at 1:30 that detonates like the name promises. Chester Young’s vocal gives it a spine so it isn’t just a sound effect with a BPM, and that’s the part that elevates it above a hundred interchangeable festival weapons. I’ll admit big-room can feel like a solved equation at this point, every track hitting the same beats in the same order, but there’s a reason the formula survives and PYRO is a clean demonstration of it. The energy is relentless and slightly ridiculous and completely unbothered by your opinion of it. This is music engineered to be heard at a volume that violates noise ordinances, surrounded by sweaty strangers, ideally while something pyrotechnic actually goes off...
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June 29, 2026 at 4:48 PM 1 min read
Pola & Bryson - Want It ft. IYAMAH (Mefjus Remix)
Read more . . . →Hand a soulful, rolling Pola & Bryson tune to Mefjus and you already know the floor is about to fall out from under it. The original Want It rode on IYAMAH’s gorgeous vocal; Mefjus keeps that warmth and then bolts a far meaner, more technical engine underneath. His drum programming has always been borderline show-off precise, and here it serves the song instead of swallowing it — the snares snap, the bass moves in ways that feel almost three-dimensional on a decent system. That tension between the tender vocal and the brutal low end is the entire appeal, and the fact that neither side wins is what makes it replayable. It’s the rare remix that respects the source while completely rewiring its insides. Played on something with actual sub, the difference between this and the original is night and day, and the original was no slouch. One of the more...
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June 29, 2026 at 2:15 PM 1 min read
Viperactive - MERCY x POP IT
Read more . . . →This is gleefully stupid in the best possible way. Viperactive takes two ideas that have no business in the same track, a “MERCY” chant and a “POP IT” bounce, and smashes them together into something built purely to make a crowd lose it. Trap Nation uploads can run together into one long beige drone of festival trap, so I notice when one of them actually has a personality, and this has personality to spare. The drop is obnoxious in the way good trap should be, with that detuned brass-honk lead that sounds like a malfunctioning car horn doing the heavy lifting. I cannot defend this on any sophisticated musical grounds and I’m not going to try. It does exactly one thing and it does it at maximum volume. Subtlety is somebody else’s department. There’s a count-in before the second drop that telegraphs the chaos coming and it still got me....
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June 29, 2026 at 1:26 PM 1 min read
Projects in Blue - Technicolour
Read more . . . →What is it about a good chord progression that can carry an entire track? Technicolour is basically a clinic in that idea — Projects in Blue find a warm, slightly nostalgic melodic core and just let it bloom. It lands in that lush, melodic-electronic zone where the line between dance music and something more cinematic gets pleasantly blurry. The percussion stays light on purpose so the harmony can do the heavy lifting, and the whole thing has a glow to it that genuinely earns the title rather than just borrowing it. This is a producer I didn’t have much of a read on going in, and the sheer confidence of the arrangement changes that fast. It would work as well scoring a drive at golden hour as it would warming up a dancefloor before the heavy stuff lands. Not every track needs to punch you in the chest; some just...
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June 29, 2026 at 10:49 AM 1 min read
Raphi - Giving U
Read more . . . →Raphi keeps it lean and effective on Giving U, and there’s something refreshing about a dance track that just gets on with it. No twelve-layer build, no manufactured drama — a clean hook, a groove that moves, and a vocal that does its job and gets politely out of the way. Spinnin releases live and die on this kind of immediacy, the song that works on first listen at a festival without needing a backstory or a lore video. The production is crisp and bright, mixed for big speakers and afternoon sun. It’s not reinventing anything and it isn’t pretending to; what it’s trying to do is make you move, and it succeeds without breaking a sweat. There’s a real skill in this kind of restraint, knowing exactly which elements to keep and which to cut before the track gets cluttered. An easy add to a summer playlist, and the...
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