How does a duo make drum and bass this warm without it turning into wallpaper? GLXY keep quietly figuring it out. NO ID rides a rolling break with a bassline that’s more felt than heard, and the whole thing has this dusky, late-set quality that a lot of liquid DnB reaches for and misses by being too clean and too bright. Around 2:25 they strip it to almost nothing, a filtered pad and a ghost of the drums, and the rebuild after is the reason to stay. There’s a jazz-chord thing happening under the second half that I keep noticing new bits of on each listen; three plays in and I found a Rhodes line I’d completely missed. This is the DnB I put on when I want the tempo without the aggression, the stuff that proves the genre has an entire soulful wing most people ignore. GLXY are one...
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July 10, 2026 at 11:54 AM
1 min read
GLXY - NO ID
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July 10, 2026 at 11:38 AM
1 min read
How to Tell a Frontier Model From a Fat Kitten
Read more . . . →Before you reshare the next screenshot of a “frontier model,” run it through the Le Chaton Fat test. Is there a real model card or product page, or just a screenshot of a chart? Can you actually call it — open weights to download, or an API key that works? Is the benchmark published and reproducible, or is the “leaderboard” one image somebody made in an afternoon? Le Chaton Fat failed all three: no weights, no API, no model card, and the only leaderboard it ever topped was a parody chart bragging about a croissant context window and 1,000 meows per second. Any model that can’t answer those three is a kitten. The good news is the joke summoned something real. Somewhere between his “le gros chaton” wink and the cartoon cat mascot, Arthur Mensch teased an actual model — “fat indeed, but sparse,” the start of a new family,...
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July 10, 2026 at 11:21 AM 1 min read
SKisM ft. Virus Syndicate - Like This (Skybreak Remix)
Read more . . . →Skybreak got his hands on a Never Say Die staple and rebuilt the whole thing from the chassis out. The original ‘Like This’ was already a brick — Virus Syndicate barking over a riff that never apologises — and this remix keeps the bars but swaps the engine for something with way more moving parts. Skybreak’s whole thing is that hyper-detailed, glitched-to-hell sound design where every eighth note gets its own little event, and about 1:40 in the drop folds in on itself twice before you’ve figured out where the downbeat went. It should feel cluttered and instead it feels engineered, like someone who actually enjoys the puzzle of making complex things groove. Those Manchester vocals still cut through all of it, which is the trick: you can pile as much detail as you want on top and Virus Syndicate refuse to get buried. I’ve played the drop back four...
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July 10, 2026 at 10:59 AM
1 min read
Trance is unfashionable and the A State of Trance crowd doesn't care
Read more . . . →A week out now. A State of Trance gets its own stage at Tomorrowland because Armin van Buuren is essentially a Belgian national monument at this point. Trance has been deeply out of fashion for years and its crowd could not care less, which is honestly the most punk thing about the whole festival. Two for the faithful: 1. Armin van Buuren - Blah Blah Blah Armin trolling the purists with a big-room stomper named after exactly what the snobs say about his commercial stuff. The joke is that it goes off harder than most of the “serious” records, and that riff is already stuck in your head. He knows. He’s laughing all the way to the mainstage. 2. Vini Vici - Great Spirit Psytrance that crossed over to the mainstage, which shouldn’t work and completely does. That rubber-band bassline at 140bpm is hypnotic, and when it drops at the...
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July 10, 2026 at 8:51 AM
1 min read
Ferreck Dawn - Lost At The End
Read more . . . →There’s a warmth to proper Toolroom house that a lot of the streaming-optimized stuff has sanded off completely, and Lost At The End has it in spades. Ferreck Dawn writes house that actually grooves, that slightly loose, organic swing that gets you nodding before you’ve consciously decided to, and this rides a piano stab and a rubbery bassline into a chorus almost too pretty for the club. The vocal hook lodged immediately; I had it going round my head on the walk to get coffee this morning, a full day after one play the night before. It builds without ever turning frantic, letting the groove do all the persuading, and when the full arrangement lands around 1:45 it feels earned rather than forced on you. This is grown-and-sexy house, the stuff for the part of the night when a crowd wants to move but not sweat through their shirts. Ferreck...
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July 10, 2026 at 7:06 AM
1 min read
Parachutes turns 26 and it still sucks
Read more . . . →26 years ago today, Coldplay released their debut album Parachutes. It still sucks. This is the record people reach for when they want to argue the band was good “before they sold out,” which is the whole con — Parachutes wasn’t a promising start that curdled later, it was the finished blueprint for two decades of beige. Chris Martin already had the formula bolted down: strum four chords, aim the falsetto at the cheap seats, and mistake sounding sad for having something to say. “Yellow” bought the beach house and “Trouble” still leaks out of every coffee shop, but the album’s actual legacy was teaching a generation of bands that if you sound earnest enough, nobody clocks that you never wrote a hook. They spent the next 26 years proving it, one stadium at a time. The real crime is the company it kept. 2000 was one of the best...
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July 10, 2026 at 6:45 AM 1 min read
Said The Sky & Jakob Ahlbom - The Swell (Vincent Remix)
Read more . . . →The build on The Swell earns its name — Vincent stretches the tension out so far past the point you expect resolution that when the drop finally arrives at 1:50 it lands like an exhale you’ve been holding for a full minute. Said The Sky’s original was already emotional melodic bass, the kind of thing that soundtracks a thousand sunset festival clips, and Vincent’s remix keeps the feeling but sharpens the edges, giving the drop actual grit instead of just glossy uplift. There’s a chopped vocal running through the breakdown that flickers between words, and the synth work sits in that sweet spot where it’s pretty enough to hum and detuned enough to keep from getting saccharine. I’m a sucker for this specific corner of melodic dubstep, the stuff that wants to make you feel something big without being embarrassed about it. The second drop swaps the lead for a...
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July 10, 2026 at 5:13 AM
1 min read
Fairlane & DJ Mii - Over Me (feat. Ames)
Read more . . . →Ames has one of those slightly cracked voices that makes melodic dubstep worth defending, and Over Me builds its entire first half around getting out of her way. Fairlane is a Monstercat regular who tends toward the emotional end of bass music, and this leans hard into that: a big open pre-chorus, a drop at 1:47 that’s more shimmer than sludge, all wide synths and a kick you feel in your ribs. It’s pretty in a way heavy music is often too embarrassed to be. The featured vocal does real work here rather than marking time until the bass shows up; the line about being over me gets chopped straight into the drop itself, so the hook and the heaviness become the same event instead of taking turns. I put this on expecting background music and ended up replaying the drop four times before I moved on with my day....
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July 10, 2026 at 1:25 AM 1 min read
Eelke Kleijn x Layla Benitez feat. Leo Wood - Beg You
Read more . . . →That descending piano figure opening Beg You does an unreasonable amount of emotional lifting before a single drum arrives. Eelke Kleijn has been one of the more reliably classy names in melodic house for years, and teaming with Layla Benitez plus Leo Wood’s vocal gives this a proper song at its center instead of just a groove with a sample dropped on top. It builds slow, the way the good melodic house always does; the bassline doesn’t fully arrive until past the two-minute mark, and by then you’re leaning in for it. Leo Wood’s voice has a smoky quality that keeps the whole thing from tipping into anthem territory. This is sunset-set music, the stuff DJs use to make a crowd sway rather than jump. I put it on during a grey afternoon and it genuinely shifted the room’s temperature up a couple of degrees. Grown-up dance music that trusts...
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July 09, 2026 at 11:44 PM 1 min read
QUIX - FEAR
Read more . . . →QUIX has always been more interested in dread than drops, and FEAR is basically a thesis statement. The New Zealander built a reputation on trap that trades the genre’s usual bombast for something colder and more paranoid, and this one leans all the way into the unease the title promises. It opens on a detuned vocal sample that sounds like it’s being played through a broken phone, then the low end creeps in underneath rather than announcing itself, and by the time the first drop lands at 1:18 the whole thing feels like walking down a stairwell that’s darker than you expected. The bass design is the star — a growl that pitch-bends downward like something deflating, more sinister than heavy. There’s a half-time switch in the back half that opens up a huge amount of space, and QUIX fills it with almost nothing, which is exactly why it works....
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July 10, 2026 at 11:54 AM
1 min read
