When did the dancefloor split into five dancefloors? Sometime between June and now, electronic music stopped being one genre and became a whole continent. The Beatport charts look like a census. Every festival stage is its own country with its own dress code. Here’s one track from each lane the summer is running on, for anyone who keeps hearing names they can’t place.
1. Prospa & Cloonee - Free Your Mind
Prospa’s live rig meets Cloonee’s low end and what comes out is four minutes of your brain stem being politely relocated. The vocal loop is two words and they do more work than most hooks manage with a full chorus. This had a Coachella tent in ruins back in April and it’s the track I keep hearing bleed through walls at every house party that crosses the line from responsible to regrettable. CircoLoco released it, which tells you less about the label and more about the rooms that play it — hot, loud, no plan B.
2. Interplanetary Criminal ft. Original Koffee - Slow Burner
Koffee on a UK garage beat, and it sounds like it was always supposed to exist this way. She won a Grammy for reggae at twenty and here she’s riding IPC’s two-step like she grew up on it, her vocal sitting right in that rubbery swing that makes you lean sideways without realising. IPC won a Juno for “No Time,” packed out rooms on two continents, and with Slow Burner he gave garage back to the vocalists. The genre needed that.
3. HUGEL & SOLTO - Jamaican (Bam Bam)
Seven million streams and the Beatport Afro House chart has been a hostage situation since November. The vocal sample is infectious in the clinical sense — it gets into your skull and schedules its own return visits. Afro house is up 778% year over year according to whoever is measuring these things, and this is the track those numbers are mostly about. It went viral in South America first and then everyone else caught on, because the groove doesn’t care what language you speak.
4. Chase & Status ft. J Hus & IRAH - Disgruntled
The title is accurate. This sounds disgruntled in the way a bouncer looks disgruntled — calm face, structural damage underneath. J Hus and IRAH over a breaks-tempo Chase & Status beat was the collision everyone wanted and it hit harder than anyone was ready for. The 808 pattern lands like controlled demolition. It dropped on July 24th and already owns every DJ set I’ve heard since.
5. Bonobo - Me and You
The lane that refuses to have a name. Bonobo put this out on Ninja Tune in June and it’s the lead single from an album due in September, and already it feels like the track this summer will age into. He’s been testing it in DJ sets in London and Paris and the crowd reaction makes sense — it’s club-paced but it breathes, and by the end of the track you’ve stopped trying to categorise it and just given in. The vocal sits right at the threshold between word and texture. Good luck getting it out of your head after the second listen.
Five dancefloors, five entry points. Four weeks left in the window.