Formula - Too Deep

Put this on at the end of a long day half-expecting to skip it inside a minute and ended up standing in my kitchen, not moving, until it finished. Too Deep earns its name by flatly refusing to hurry. Formula lets the intro stretch out for ages, a low detuned drone and a loose scatter of hi-hats, before the bass even considers arriving. When it finally lands it is more a slow pressure than a hit, weight that rolls in and settles over the whole room, the kind that only reveals itself on a proper system and disappears completely out of a laptop. Restraint is the entire personality here. Where plenty of producers would pile the drop with ten layers of growl competing for the same frequency, Formula keeps it to two or three moving parts and trusts the sub to carry everything else. A single vocal fragment surfaces near the halfway point, pitched down and smeared until the words dissolve and only the ache behind them is left. It never builds to a second, bigger moment, because the pressure itself is the moment, and the track is sure enough of that to leave it alone. This is patient, faintly menacing music built for the small hours and a good subwoofer, and it held my full attention in a way very little has managed lately. I have already queued it twice more. I will be living with this one a while.

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