Giuseppe Ottaviani, Gabry Ponte & Crooked Bangs - Astra

Giuseppe Ottaviani and Gabry Ponte on the same track is the kind of Italian name-on-name pairing that should not need a third producer, and yet here’s Crooked Bangs making the case for one. “Astra” goes exactly where you think it’s going, and I mean that as a compliment. Ottaviani has spent years being the guy who keeps proper uplifting trance alive while everyone else chased festival drops, and Ponte is, well, Ponte, the man who has been writing big obvious Italo hooks since before half the Tomorrowland crowd was born. Put them together and you get a track with zero shame about being direct. The hook arrives fast, the vocal from Crooked Bangs gives the whole thing a face to look at, and then the breakdown does its job and the back half just opens up. There’s no clever misdirection here. It tells you what it is in the first thirty seconds and then delivers it, which is the entire point. This came out on Armada in late May and it has already crawled into the trance radio shows, which makes sense because it’s built for exactly that room — hands up, lights down, nobody overthinking it. I keep waiting for the moment where it gets too cheesy for me and it never quite does. It stays on the right side of the line, which for trance this unapologetic is genuinely hard to pull off. Volume up. Let it be what it is.

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