Down To The Sound rides one rubbery bassline for its whole runtime and never once gets boring, which is its own kind of flex. Curbi was making festival-sized records before he could legally drink, and this is him sounding fully grown into the sound he’s chased since he was a teenager. It’s a groove-first house track, less concerned with a huge drop than with a low end that refuses to sit still. A vocal snippet gets chopped into the rhythm so tightly it becomes percussion. That’s the trick here: everything is groove and nothing is filler. The drop doesn’t explode so much as lock in, and locking in is honestly harder to pull off well than exploding. Around 2:10 there’s a filtered breakdown that strips it to just the bass and a clap, and the way it rebuilds is masterful pacing for someone still this young. It’s the kind of track a DJ can drop at almost any point in a set and trust to do work. Not a peak-time bomb so much as a peak-time glue that holds the whole night together.
January
Chrome Daydream
Chrome stars, jelly hearts and holographic colour. A nod to the glossy, optimistic graphics of the early web.