This is a Carlos Vives flip and it absolutely should not work as well as it does. Ese Beso takes Fruta Fresca, a vallenato-pop song your Colombian aunt has loved for twenty-five years, and drops it into a big Spinnin’ dance record, and the collision is ridiculous in the way the best party tracks are. The original melody is unmistakable, all sunshine and accordion, and Luchi welds it to a four-on-the-floor kick and a drop built for a beach club at golden hour. What makes it land is that he keeps enough of the original’s warmth intact; a lazier producer would have buried the accordion, and instead it’s front and centre doing the heavy lifting. It wants nothing except to make a room move, and it gets there fast. I put it on and immediately wanted a drink with an umbrella in it. That reaction is the entire review, and...
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September 14, 2026 at 11:14 AM 1 min read
Luchi dj - Ese Beso (Fruta Fresca)
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September 14, 2026 at 6:16 AM
1 min read
The Smallest Slice Since 1947
Read more . . . →Since 1947, the government has tracked how much of the economy goes to the people who actually do the work. This year it hit 52.8 percent — the lowest number in the entire dataset. Not during Reagan. Not during the 2008 crash. Not during COVID. Right now, with corporate pre-tax profits at $4.8 trillion in a single quarter. The economy is doing fine. Your cut of it isn’t. Elon Musk’s Tesla compensation last year came out to $158 billion — 2.5 million times what the median Tesla employee made. Two and a half million times. The S&P 500 has gained 600 percent since 2000. Worker wages, adjusted for inflation, gained 12.5 percent. That gap has a golf course on one side and a food bank on the other. CEOs averaged $22.8 million in 2025 — 312 times their median worker, up from 285 the year before. The ratio doesn’t plateau....
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September 13, 2026 at 9:31 PM 1 min read
LEYO & Thierry Ganz - Stamina (Extended Mix)
Read more . . . →You already know if a Defected extended mix is for you, and Stamina is a good one. LEYO and Thierry Ganz turn in a piano-and-bassline house cut built for the long haul, which the seven-minute runtime makes clear from the jump. This is proper daytime-terrace house: a rolling groove, a vocal chopped into a mantra, and a piano riff that shows up at the halfway mark and lifts the whole thing into the sky. Defected have a formula and it’s a good formula, and Stamina hits every beat of it without feeling lazy about it. The bassline has a lovely round warmth that a lot of house forgets to include while it’s busy chasing the hook. I put it on to answer emails and answered zero emails. That’s the test for this kind of track: does it make an ordinary afternoon feel like the good part of a holiday? This...
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September 13, 2026 at 4:48 PM 1 min read
Joker - SETI
Read more . . . →The synth lead on SETI sounds like a cathedral organ someone rewired into a spaceship, which is the most Joker thing imaginable. The Bristol producer basically invented the “purple” strain of dubstep back when the genre was one big argument, and this is him still mining that seam of woozy, detuned melody over half-step drums. What lands is how patient it is; the first minute is all atmosphere and a bassline that keeps threatening to arrive before it finally does, thick and rubbery and worth the wait. It’s got that video-game-boss-fight grandeur he does better than almost anyone, melody carrying as much weight as the low end. I’ve always liked that Joker never chased the brostep money when it was sitting right there for the taking, and kept making these strange, regal little tracks instead. SETI is more of that, and I’m glad it still exists in a scene that...
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September 13, 2026 at 4:36 PM 1 min read
Steering as a Service
Read more . . . →The car still turns. It just wants to know if you’re on the annual plan. You bought the car. You did not, apparently, buy the part of the car that goes left. Heated seats were the warning shot and the wheel was always the plan. Cancel anytime, ideally at a red light.
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September 13, 2026 at 1:26 PM 1 min read
Joel Corry - Whisper (Will Sparks Remix)
Read more . . . →Heard this blasting out of a passing car before I ever saw the title, which is the most honest endorsement a dance track can get. Will Sparks takes Joel Corry’s Whisper and drags it into Melbourne bounce territory, all that off-kilter bouncing kick and the detuned lead that made the sound huge in Australia years back. Joel Corry is about as commercial as UK dance gets, and I usually find his stuff a bit airless, but the Sparks remix roughs it up in a way I actually enjoy. The bounce rhythm gives it a lurch the polished original never had, and the whole thing feels sweatier and less focus-grouped for it. It’s still pop-dance at heart, but there’s some real grit smuggled into the low end here. I caught myself doing the stupid little bounce-nod in my chair, which is the body voting before the brain gets a say. Better...
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September 13, 2026 at 10:49 AM 1 min read
Hyper Potions & Nokae - 1-2 Finish (feat. Nat James)
Read more . . . →How do you make speed house that doesn’t leave you exhausted? Hyper Potions and Nokae seem to have cracked it on 1-2 Finish, because this thing sprints and somehow stays fun the whole way. Hyper Potions built their name on that hyper-bright, Sonic-trailer sugar rush, and here they aim it at the 150-BPM speed house lane with Nat James on vocals holding it together. The tempo should be tiring and instead it’s giddy; the bassline bounces like it’s on a trampoline and the whole thing grins at you. Nat James keeps it human, an actual hook instead of just a chopped syllable riding the beat. What I appreciate is that it never mistakes fast for aggressive. It’s quick and warm at the same time, and that combination is rarer than it should be. This is straightforwardly joyful music, and I’m a little tired of pretending joyful is a lesser mode...
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September 13, 2026 at 7:13 AM
4 min read
This Week on coldplaysucks — Sept 6-13
Read more . . . →Forty-one tracks posted, a completely new top 10, and every artist who held a chart position last month got bounced. House led the volume, DnB kept pace, dubstep stayed heavy, and a trance track from June is somehow running the board as summer refuses to end. The Charts Full reset. Every track on last month’s chart dropped off and ten new entries took their places. Nobody held, nobody climbed — they all got replaced. TLM feat. Merely - Summer Jam — new on the chart and sitting at the top, three months after posting. Listen → Born On Road & P Money - Bristol Style — new entry, straight in at two. Listen → Nova Blue & EV - Weekend Cinderella — new entry. Listen → SKALAH, Riko Dan - Thriller in Manila — new entry. Listen → Skrillex - Bangarang (BRLLNT Edit) — new entry, because 2012 never actually...
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September 13, 2026 at 6:19 AM
1 min read
Day 196 and a Tee Time
Read more . . . →It’s Day 196 of the war with Iran. Twenty-nine people have been executed in connection with anti-war protests. And the President of the United States is at a golf tournament in Doonbeg, Ireland — at a course he owns, the one that paid him $20 million last year. Five cargo planes full of armored Secret Service vehicles flew across the Atlantic so the man who started a war could sit in a hospitality tent and watch the Irish Open. Ireland footed a €20 million security bill for the visit. The Secret Service is booking rooms at his hotel, buying food at his club, and sending the tab to American taxpayers. The grift isn’t hidden. It’s the itinerary. While he was there, he told reporters a united Ireland was inevitable and “may as well happen now.” Redrawing a century of contested borders from a lounge chair at his own resort in...
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September 12, 2026 at 8:21 PM 1 min read
HerShe & Bass Ventura - MAXIMUM SHELLA
Read more . . . →When did dubstep decide it wanted to be a soundsystem again? MAXIMUM SHELLA is HerShe and Bass Ventura going full dancehall-in-a-warehouse, all air horns and “shella” chants and a bassline that behaves less like a synth and more like a physical object being dragged across the floor. This is the fun end of the genre, the part that remembers dubstep grew out of reggae soundsystem culture and not out of a Skrillex tutorial. The drop is pure ignorant-in-a-good-way weight, the kind of thing that only fully makes sense at volume with other people losing it around you. There’s a moment where the beat cuts to just the vocal and a single sub note, and the tension in that gap is unbearable in the best way. This wants exactly one thing, to flatten a dancefloor, and it gets there fast. I put it on expecting throwaway and ran it back five...
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