When did Monstercat start making hard techno, and why is the label this good at it? Dopamine would have been unthinkable here five years ago, back when the whole identity was festival bass and tidy lyric-video melodics. Now there is a distorted 150bpm kick doing real damage under a vocal built to be screamed in a sweaty room with the strobes going. Hard techno spent the last couple of years clawing its way out of Berlin basements and onto basically every festival on earth, and this is what the sound looks like once someone polishes it for a bigger stage without filing the teeth off. The rave stabs are pure 90s revival, the sort of blunt euphoric chord that stopped being embarrassing the moment everyone under 25 decided it was cool again. Conrad Taylor and Courtney Paige Nelson trade a hook that aims a good deal higher than most techno toplines dare to. I was not expecting to like this as much as I do, and I have stopped fighting it. Full-send festival techno with the dirt left in.
January
Chrome Daydream
Chrome stars, jelly hearts and holographic colour. A nod to the glossy, optimistic graphics of the early web.