What is it about a big trance vocal that still short-circuits my brain after all these years? “Holding Onto You” is uplifting, unapologetic vocal trance of the kind that never really goes out of style no matter what the tastemakers insist. CHANEY builds it around a soaring topline and a supersaw-drenched drop that goes straight for the emotional jugular and doesn’t flinch. There’s a moment at 2:15 where the beat cuts out entirely and the vocal hangs alone for a single bar before everything crashes back in, and that’s the hands-in-the-air payoff the whole track is engineered around. It isn’t reinventing trance and has no interest in doing so; it wants to make you feel fifteen years old at your first festival, and it succeeds completely. The chord changes are pure serotonin. Yes it’s a bit cheesy, but trance has always been a bit cheesy, that’s the contract you sign the moment you press play, and I love it for exactly that reason. Some nights you just want the payoff with no irony attached to it.
Not the first time CHANEY has shown up here — CHANEY - Love Claim