“REWIND” opens on a vocal chop that stutters like a scratched CD, and DJ PUMA spends the rest of the track earning that glitch. It’s punchy, melodic electronic in the NCS house style (clean, bright, engineered to cut through a phone speaker at full volume during someone’s montage) but there’s more grit in the low end than that description suggests. The drop rides a detuned lead over a bassline that carries some actual weight, and the breakdown pulls a nice trick where the beat cuts out and the vocal loops naked for a couple bars before everything slams back. It’s mixed loud and forward, the way a track built to survive tinny laptop speakers has to be, and it holds together fine when you finally hand it a real set of headphones. It’s functional music, doing precisely what a young producer building a catalogue on a big free-music channel should: make something immediate that travels. It travels, no question. Whether it sticks past this month is another matter, but right now it’s a genuinely good four minutes.
Not the first time DJ PUMA has shown up here: DJ PUMA - LOVESICK