The drop on Feel Alive swaps the expected trap snare for what sounds like a detuned choir glitching mid-hymn, and it’s the best decision on the record. This is melodic trap off Trap Nation, BraydenK and Duke Gray building the emotional, festival-sized kind rather than the menacing street kind. The first half is all uplift, a pitched vocal and a bright synth lead promising a big euphoric payoff, and then the drop delivers something stranger and heavier than the intro advertised. What keeps it alive is the tension between the sweet topline and the genuinely aggressive low end underneath, like two songs politely disagreeing. The vocal chop repeats the title until it stops being language and turns into rhythm, a trick the whole genre runs on and this one runs well. It’s big and bright and a little overwrought and entirely sincere about it, and I respect the total absence of irony. Whatever I expected, filler this was not.
January
Chrome Daydream
Chrome stars, jelly hearts and holographic colour. A nod to the glossy, optimistic graphics of the early web.