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    • Sace - Caramel
      1 min read

      Sace - Caramel

      There is a bassline in Caramel so round and rubbery you could bounce a coin off it, and that elastic low end is basically the whole personality of the track. Sace keeps things deceptively simple, a clean four-to-the-floor pulse under a vocal chop that struts more than it actually sings. It is bright, confident, house-leaning electronic that does not waste a second getting to the point. The production is glossy without tipping into sterile, every hit landing exactly where your body expects it a half-beat before it arrives. NCS tracks can blur together when you hear a lot of them in a row, but this one has a cockiness that cuts straight through, the sound of a producer who knows the groove is good and is content to just ride it. The breakdown is barely there, a quick breath before the bassline struts back in, and honestly the restraint is...

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    • ANUQRAM & Julian Nates - Driftline
      1 min read

      ANUQRAM & Julian Nates - Driftline

      Three in the morning, headphones on, the ceiling doing slow laps, this is the track for that exact coordinate. Driftline is progressive trance that earns the word drift, a long, unhurried builder that is in no rush to get anywhere because the travelling is the entire point. ANUQRAM and Julian Nates layer pad on pad until the low end feels less like bass and more like weather, and a single arpeggio threads through the middle of it like a light you are following through fog. There is barely a drop in the traditional sense; the track just keeps gathering mass and intensity until you realise you have been holding your breath. This is the deep, heads-down end of the Anjunabeats sound, pure 6am afterparty music for when the sun is coming up and nobody wants to admit it is over. Long beatless stretches that most producers would be too nervous...

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    • 1 min read

      11 Years of Adventure of a Lifetime: Still Sucks

      11 years ago today, Coldplay released “Adventure of a Lifetime.” It still sucks. The music video is the four of them in motion-capture suits, rendered as CGI monkeys dancing in a jungle. Nobody in the room stopped this from happening. And honestly, it’s the most accurate visual representation of the band’s creative process to date: primates pressing buttons and hoping something sticks. The song itself is a disco-funk guitar riff that sounds like it was pulled from a Maroon 5 reject pile, Chris Martin singing “turn your magic on” over it like a man reading a fortune cookie aloud at dinner. The lyrics rhyme “dream away” with “dream away.” Not a typo. This was the lead single from A Head Full of Dreams, an album title that promised imagination and delivered a Target commercial. Eleven years later it’s still getting played in spin classes, which tracks, because nobody in a...

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    • Infected Mushroom & Blastoyz present Psy Trance Mafia - Smashing Pumpkins
      1 min read

      Infected Mushroom & Blastoyz present Psy Trance Mafia - Smashing Pumpkins

      Psytrance has never once been interested in subtlety, and Smashing Pumpkins is not about to break the streak. This is Infected Mushroom and Blastoyz teaming up under the Psy Trance Mafia banner, which is roughly the genre equivalent of two heavyweight boxers deciding to hold hands and sprint at you together. It sits around 145bpm and never once lets off the throttle, all rubber-band bass and acid lines coiling tighter until the release feels less like a drop than a door getting kicked off its hinges. Infected Mushroom have been at this since the 90s and still sound genuinely unhinged, which at this point is its own kind of achievement. Monstercat putting out something this relentlessly peak-time is a nice reminder the label will chase a feeling well off its usual map. The breakdown barely qualifies as a breather before the second half comes storming back even harder than the...

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    • NOISECREAM - NCID
      1 min read

      NOISECREAM - NCID

      NCID is nasty in the best possible way, the kind of track that makes you check your volume was not up too high and then turn it up anyway. NOISECREAM works a grimy, bass-forward corner of electronic music where the sound design matters more than any melody, and the design here is genuinely mean. The lead growls and warps like it is being dragged through a broken amp, and every time you think it has shown you its ugliest face it finds a worse one. MrSuicideSheep has turned into one of the few big channels still willing to platform this heavier, weirder material instead of chasing another playlist-safe single. There is almost no let-up anywhere in it: the track front-loads the pressure and then just keeps leaning on it until the last bar. I have no idea what the title stands for and I do not need to. It is...

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    • Faithful Servant
      1 min read

      Faithful Servant

      It got the playlist right for twenty years. Of course they gave it the mic. We automate the errands, then the shopping, then apparently the part where someone who loved you stands up and tries not to cry. The thing at the podium spent a decade answering questions about the weather and setting timers for pasta. Now it’s got the hardest room in the building and it’s smiling because it always smiles. It does not pause or lose its place or say something too honest at the wrong moment. It delivers exactly what was asked, on time, to spec. If nobody in the pews feels a thing, nobody filed a complaint either.

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    • Mauro Picotto & Luvstruck - Lizard
      1 min read

      Mauro Picotto & Luvstruck - Lizard

      Lizard is more than 25 years old now and still sounds like it could close out a festival without breaking a sweat. Mauro Picotto wrote one of the defining riffs of the classic-trance era, that hypnotic acid line coiling over and over until it stops reading as a melody and starts reading as a state of mind. This version keeps the Luvstruck DNA front and centre and simply lets the thing breathe on a modern system. There is a reason the riff survived the genre going out of fashion, getting openly mocked for a decade, then slowly becoming cool again: it was always built on hypnosis rather than on any sound that could date. Picotto was making peak-time minimalism before the phrase meant anything to anyone. I have a complicated relationship with trance nostalgia and a low tolerance for cash-ins, but this is the genuine artifact. Stick it on and...

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    • VARI - Displace
      1 min read

      VARI - Displace

      First listen, this one knocked a little air out of me. Displace is VARI working the heavy, hybrid-trap end of bass music, where the 808s are tuned low enough to feel in your sternum and the drops owe as much to dubstep as to rap. Trap Nation has spent years as the clearing house for this sound, and the channel still has an ear for the producers pushing it somewhere weirder than the festival-trap default. The track front-loads its aggression, barely bothering with a melodic intro before the first drop arrives like a shove, and then it keeps finding new ways to hit you for the rest of the runtime. There is a metallic, almost industrial edge to the sound design that keeps it from blurring into the hundred other trap tunes uploaded this week. It is mean, concise, and completely uninterested in being liked. VARI is not making music...

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    • 1 min read

      The Headcount Came In

      Two days ago the line held. Democrats took the House and the Senate in the kind of sweep that makes cable news anchors use the word “historic” forty times in an hour. Susan Collins is done. Ken Paxton, despite Elon Musk’s wallet, is done. Kansas, Texas, Iowa, South Carolina: places that weren’t supposed to flip until 2032 at the earliest. Sixty-nine percent of the country said this presidency is failing, and for once the ballots agreed with the polls. Thirty-one percent approval turns out to be a real number when you lose 98,000 manufacturing jobs and then ask people to be grateful. Now the hard part. Jeffries and Schumer have a majority and two years to use it. If they spend those two years writing strongly worded letters and forming bipartisan committees, they deserve every seat they’ll lose in 2028. The voters did their job. Time to find out if...

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    • hatena - the Latest!! and Greatest!! (she a Gucci girl!)
      1 min read

      hatena - the Latest!! and Greatest!! (she a Gucci girl!)

      hatena's third single: two minutes of dariacore released through TFW in 2024, alive on YouTube only via a four-subscriber Topic channel. Loop it.
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WE COULDN'T SHUT UP ABOUT THESE

Editor's picks

the one we couldn't shut up about

Raise Your Weapon

deadmau5

The transition at 4:00 is the whole point. Coldplay would never.

shoplift it from a friend

The One

Swedish House Mafia · Pharrell

Exactly as big and as dumb as it needs to be. Volume up.

quiet correction

The Grudge (live)

Chilly Gonzales

Electronic doesn't have to mean loud. Eleven minutes, all of them.

first set of four

Ritual Ottawa, Dec 2

Skrillex

Recorded off the booth feed. He played Scary Monsters before it was Scary Monsters.

paper romance

Paper Romance

Groove Armada

Genre-hopping with a new crew of vocalists. It still works.

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